By Michelle Pelletier Marshall, Global AgInvesting Media, and Ever After Foods
Photo courtesy of Ever After Foods
In this segment of our “Three Questions With…”, which introduces agtech companies to our audience, GAI News heard from Eyal Rosenthal, CEO of Ever After Foods (EAF), which is a cultivated meat innovator working to reinvent meat production with disruptive technology.
The startup company leverages the technological and scientific capabilities of Pluri, its parent company, with the development, sales, marketing, and distribution expertise of Israel’s largest food producer, Tnuva, to pioneer cell expansion technology and specialize in mass-scale production of stem cells to create great tasting meat that is nutritionally superior.
Rosenthal, also chairman of foodtech incubator Fresh Start (backed by the Israeli government), and previously on the Finistere Ventures team in Israel, knows a thing or two about investing in the ag space and introducing and strategically growing a startup in the sector. We asked him our “three questions”:
1). Tell us about your company.
The company was originally established in 2022 through an agreement between a cell expansion technology pioneer specializing in the large-scale production of stem cells, Pluri (Nasdaq: PLUR), and Tnuva, Israel’s largest food manufacturer and the leader in the local alternative protein market.
Officially launching as Ever After Foods (EAF) in 2023, our mission is to bring cultivated meat to the mass market at scale. We’ve successfully evolved the original biotech-focused technology into a food-grade platform. Combining the best of science and culinary art, Ever After Foods has developed a proprietary production system that takes a completely different approach than all other companies in the space, overcoming traditional scalability, cost, and sustainability hurdles. We are reinventing meat by delivering an ethical, sustainable way to create slaughter-free, delicious, premium cultivated meat products at unprecedented scale.
2). Tell us about your technology and what changes it will bring about.
There are currently no off-the-shelf bioreactors for producing cultivated meat at scale. Moreover, existing platforms are based on stirred-tank bioreactor technology, which at high scales generates unavoidable shear stress that negatively impacts animal cells and thus limits production yields and the ability to scale.
Ever After Foods’ proprietary bioreactor system overcomes current limitations, including scalability and meat parity. From a 1,400- liter bioreactor, we can get over 400 kg of cultivated meat. To produce the same amount, our competitors will need to scale their processes to bioreactors of over 10,000 liters, which are not feasible for use with animal cells.
Our cultivated meat products will be produced without compromising on taste or nutritional value. Our proprietary bioreactor platform includes in-house developed edible scaffolds and other patented innovations that make our pilot system highly productive – in fact, it yields seven times more cultivated meat per run than our competitors. Its unique design also protects the cells from mechanical stresses and combines the macro-tissues responsible for optimizing taste, feel and texture.
3). Tell us why the GAI investment and agribusiness audience should be interested.
Reinventing how we produce and consume meat will be a critical component of a more sustainable food chain, and solving the complex scalability challenge is the only way to make cultured meat a sustainable meat alternative. As the GAI audience’s interests include sustainable and impact investing, as well as food production, we believe that they will find much to interest them in EAF.
Based on CE Delft and GFI LCA 2030 benchmarks, the total environmental footprint for EAF is lowest, compared to both conventional and cultivated meat. For example:
Carbon footprint: Cultivated meat carbon footprint is expected to be 94 percent less than that of conventional meat. EAF’s carbon footprint will reduce this by an additional 45 percent. Moreover, due to reduction in bioreactor size, EAF facilities will require less land, enabling local production and minimizing transportation emissions.
Energy consumption: Use of energy in cultivated meat production is higher due to the electricity required for the process, as well as for media production. EAF uses 74 pecent less media, as well as smaller bioreactors, bringing energy consumption to a 74 percent lower rate.
With the right combination of food-grade cell technology, culinary mastery and food value chain connections, the next generation of cultivated meat will provide an animal-friendly alternative that can deliver even more nutrients and protein to meet global food security needs, while reducing environmental impacts (from greenhouse gas emissions to agricultural land and water usage). Ever After Foods hopes to lead the next era of efficient development, production, and distribution of high-quality cultivated meat products at a global scale.
– Michelle Pelletier Marshall is contributing editor and author for HighQuest Partners’ GAI News and Unconventional Ag, and managing editor for its WIA Today blog. Additionally, she is the company’s Senior PR/Media Manager. She can be reached at marshall@highquestpartners.com.
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