NEW TECH FOODS

Cultivated meat startup Clever Carnivore has announced progress in its efforts to produce affordable, scalable lab-grown pork.

The company says it has reached key technical and cost milestones with just $9 million in funding since its founding in 2021.

Clever Carnivore says it has developed a food-grade cell culture medium that costs just $0.07 per litre to produce at pilot scale. This is significantly lower than the $1 to $10 per litre range reported across the industry. The company also claims to have created non-GMO pork cells that double in under 14 hours, allowing for faster and higher-yield meat production.

To support these advances, Clever Carnivore designed a low-cost bioprocess system using secondhand and custom-built equipment. Its pilot facility operates two 500-liter stainless steel bioreactors, with a third on the way.

By sourcing equipment creatively and working directly with steel fabricators, the company has kept its projected full-scale plant buildout under $4.5 million. It expects the plant to be profitable in its first year of operation.

Alongside technical development, the company has created a range of pork products – including sausages, hotdogs and meatballs – that have received positive feedback from chefs and taste testers. The products are designed to cook and taste like conventional pork, and Clever Carnivore aims to sell them at price parity with traditional meat once scaled.

Paul Burridge, chief science officer and co-founder of Clever Carnivore, stated: “$0.07 per litre is our current real-world cost of our food-grade cell culture media. That’s what we’re paying today – including our in-house growth factor production, water purification and mixing. We anticipate further reductions as we scale to a production plant with a capacity of thousands of litres. Low media cost is essential for a production plant, as this is one of the larger inputs to our COGS.”

“We continuously develop new cell lines in the latest version of our optimised media formula to keep innovation moving and maximise proliferation and robustness.”

He added: “When designing a plant, it is important to consider that this is an FDA-and USDA-approvable facility that will operate in a traditional food production manner. We will have a well-validated process, high-level quality controls and equipment that is proven and can be amortised under known schedules."

"We can’t have cost cutting result in lack of robustness and diminished uptime in the production plant. That would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Our factory is designed with all these considerations and more in mind.”

Top image: © Clever Carnivore