Luyef is developing technology to industrialize cell-cultivated meat and using precision fermentation to produce animal proteins, Kris Blanchard, CEO and co-founder of Luyef, told FoodNavigator-USA.
Luyef received $250,000 from the Good Food Institute to develop a sustainable and cost-efficient medium — with a strain of Trichoderma (a fungus found in all soils) and a lipid-rich yeast — for cell-cultivated meat, explained Blanchard.
Additionally, the Chilean Economic Development Agency granted Luyef $1 million to promote innovation in the country and to scale cell-cultivated meat production. This will fund research in upcycling barley to be used to feed the Trichoderma to produce cell-cultivated meat, cheaply and more efficiently.
These grants are designed to unlock efficiencies and cost-saving in the cell-cultivated supply chain, he added.
Luyef is prototyping its first product, a bovine myoglobin-based ingredient, dubbed “The Authentic Meat-Eating Experience” or TAMEE. The food-tech company is authorized to produce and sell TAMEE in Chile. It will seek regulatory approval for its technology in the US but has not started the formal approval process in the US, Blanchard said.
Blanchard said he is optimistic about the eventual regulatory approval, noting that “the US is very open to this kind of technology.”
The cell-cultivated meat long game: Price parity ‘will not happen in five or 10 years’
The cell-cultivated meat industry is emerging from the “trough of disillusionment” after several years of slumping venture capital funding and food-tech companies closing down or scaling back ambitions. The trough of disillusionment is a term coined by research firm Gartner to describe waning excitement for a technology.
SCiFi Foods closed its doors in June, five months after the food-tech company’s first production run of cell-cultivated beef grown via single-cell suspension. Upside Foods also recently laid off 26 employees and restructured to focus on commercialization.
Additionally, the cell-cultivated meat industry faces questions and challenges on scalability (i.e., moving beyond a pilot plant setting) and cost, with traditional animal-based meats often significantly cheaper.
Luyef is taking a long-term view on biotech’s potential even as it projects price parity to animal-based meat might be decades away, Blanchard acknowledged.
“Cultivated meat will surpass the technical limitations and will be competitive in terms of price related to conventional animal meat, but this will not happen in five or 10 years,” Blanchard elaborated.
Luyef insulates itself from the risk of running a cell-cultivated meat company creating technology to serve a range of industries, including biomedicine and cosmetics.
“A lot of money went into cultivated meat, but without doing the proper due diligence in terms of the technology, and this is one of the advantages that we have. We are very strong in terms of technology, very robust,” Blanchard said.
He added, “We are expanding a little bit the definition of what we do, and we are not defining ourselves as a cellular agriculture company, but rather a deep biotechnology developer with applications in several industries.”
