How Israel Became The Most Promising Land For Clean Meat

In Israel, there are four promising startups working to create the meat of the future: Aleph Farms, SuperMeat, Future Meat Technologies, and BioFood Systems. Interestingly, they focus on four different products. Aleph Farms’ aim is to grow nothing less than a whole steak; SuperMeat wants to bring its customers lab-grown chicken, FM Technologies is developing a “distributive manufacturing” model that would allow small businesses (and ideally even individual consumers) to produce small quantities of clean meat, and BioFood Systems wants to produce beef products using bovine embryonic stem cells.

Clean meat startups usually focus on growing processed meat (e.g. hamburgers) rather than entire cuts (e.g. a t-bone steak) because it’s quite complicated to recreate their labyrinthine structure of blood vessels. For this reason, as soon as I heard about Aleph Farms’ challenge to hit the market with a fully lab-grown steak, I reached out to its CEO and co-founder Didier Toubia. A biologist and food-engineer by education, Didier Toubia worked for many years in the field of medical innovation before switching to the clean meat space.

It’s easy to imagine that Toubia’s medical background influenced his approach to clean meat sphere, conceived by him not “just as a mass of muscle cells but as a tissue with a precise structure.” Indeed, to develop its lab-grown steak, Aleph Farms acquired from the Israel Institute of Technology the rights for the use of a patented tissue, originally developed for medical applications.

“This is the first competitive advantage of the Israeli clean meat ecosystem,” highlighted Mr. Toubia, “As a country, we have a noteworthy pedigree in science and technology studies, especially in stem cells research. And this way we can leverage the know-how of the many good universities that are based here.”

I then asked him about others competitive advantages of Israeli firms in the clean meat field. He states, “in Israel, there’s the world’s largest per capita population of vegans, around five percent of the population. The average consumer is usually keen on exploring meat alternatives. This is also due to the fact that animal welfare is held in high regard by the Jewish tradition.”

The report continues here on Forbes.com by David Banis.