Dutch Cultivated Meat Company Meatable Reveals Its Pork Sausages

Sustainability Dutch Cultivated Meat Company Meatable Reveals Its Pork Sausages Daniela De Lorenzo Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about sustainable food & agriculture production systems. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jul 20, 2022, 01:30am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The pork sausage unveiled by the Dutch startup Meatable. Meatable Netherlands’ agricultural success based on its pioneering farming methods is now again at the forefront of food innovation thanks to its cultured meat ecosystem. Delft-based Meatable , one of the country’s cultured meat companies, has just unveiled its first fully cultured product: a pork sausage, said to ‘even produce the signature sizzle in the pan’.

After its Series A funding in 2021 where it raised $47 million , Meatable has worked on its commercial launch refining its process to grow cultivated meat using its opti-ox™ technology, so that it only needs one single cell sample to then replicate meat tissues. Meatable decided to create sausages to satisfy potential customers in Europe and the US, where Germany alone comprising around 27% of the total volume of sausages consumed worldwide. However the newly made sausage seems to be just the first on a long list of possible products the company wants to deliver: “We want to tailor the products to the market that we want to enter since not everybody likes the same type of products.

For that we are doing market investigation on what is resonating with people,” said Daan Luining, co-founder and CTO of Meatable. Earlier in May, the Dutch government placed $61 million funds to help the foodtech industry to thrive: “One of the reasons the Dutch government decided to invest in cultured meat is because we have a large agricultural sector, which needs to diversify, and everybody knows it,” continued Luining. Thanks to their greenhouses and agritech the Netherlands is one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, exporting $67 billion worth of vegetables, fruit, meat and dairy products each year.

However the intensive agriculture model of the Netherlands, makes it reach the highest livestock concentration in the European Union , heavily impacting on the country’s emissions production: “The biggest win we’re gonna make is on methane reduction for cows or ammonia for pigs,” said Luining about the production of their cultivated products. It takes only a few weeks to grow Meatable’s sausages, while traditional farming will require more time and more natural resources in order to be produced. However, according to the life cycle assessments conducted by researchers of the Dutch University of Delf, cultivated pork or chicken meat can only have a lower footprint than traditional farming, if producers will be using renewable energy to power their bioreactors.

The potential health benefits of cultivated meat are that these products can be modelled to the requests of consumers, having better nutritional values, added vitamins and minerals while containing less dangerous fat, and no antibiotics, used on animals within industrial farming. But first they have to be checked. Earlier this month a panel discussion at the European Parliament in Brussels between policymakers, cultured meat and agriculture stakeholders underlined the need for the products to be safe for consumption.

Before being available on the EU market any new “novel food” must pass an health check via the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) which can take a minimum of 18 months. MORE FOR YOU Is Carbon Capture Another Fossil Fuel Industry Con? Sustainable Fashion Wants Brands To Redefine Business Growth Trouble With Predicting Future Of Transportation Is That Today Gets In The Way When asked whether the company will soon submit their request to the EU body a spokesperson for Meatable responded that ‘ In our own research as well as in other surveys all indicate taste as the key driver for continued consumption. Once we are completely satisfied – which we believe given current developments will go fast – we will start our filing process’.

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