GrowMeat is a cultivated meat startup based in Málaga, Spain, founded by biologist and University of Málaga (UMA) researcher Estefanía García Luque.
GrowMeat aims to cultivate the meat of the future to offer more sustainable and healthy foods with a faster and more economical meat production system.
García Luque told SUR that cultivating meat is not “science fiction” but an economic activity involving huge investments that will ultimately bring substantial sustainability improvements to the planet. She added that the meat sector is under social and economic scrutiny due to its environmental impact, which destroys ecosystems and habitats and uses excessive water.
Cultivated meat in Spain
Other companies already operating in the Spanish cell ag sector include:
Biotech Foods: A cultivated meat producer researching cell lines, cultured media, and biomaterials to scale up cultivated meat production to an industrial level. It was acquired by Brazil’s JBS (the world’s largest meat processing company) in 2021. Last year, Biotech Foods received a €753,000 grant for its investMEAT project from the Spanish Foreign Trade Institute (ICEX). It also announced plans to build a cultivated meat center in the Basque region.
Cocuus: Uses 3D bioprinting to create plant and cell-based meat. The company uses a proprietary printing technique with in-house designed bio-inks, AI, and mathematical models. Last year, Cocuus raised €2.5 million to scale its 3D bioprinting technology to produce alternative proteins. The round was backed by Cargill Ventures, the investment arm of multinational meat giant Cargill.
Cubiq Foods: A B2B company that develops and produces plant-based and cultivated fats. Its goal is to replace animal fats and saturated vegetable oils with smart options. The company makes three products that enhance taste and food mouthfeel: low-caloric vegetable oil, omega-3-rich vegetable oil, and cell-cultivated oil (also rich in omega-3). Cubiq Foods claims to be the only producer of cultivated fats in Europe.
Creating production protocols
GrowMeat was set up this January after García Luque won a UMA Flash Session Hackathon prize at a prestigious entrepreneurship program at the University of Berkeley in California. A biologist team has recently joined the company, including CTO Pablo Ponce López, a biologist with an MSc in tissue engineering.
“We are at an early stage, submitting ideas to contests and seeking funding. We are, for example, in the UMA acceleration program called YUMP, and the company’s idea is to patent one or several production protocols and provide them to meat companies so that they can produce their own line of cultivated meat,” Ponce told vegconomist.
Source : Vegconomist
