Barcelona-Based Startup Blue Hybrid Meat Alternative Might Be The Solution To The Industry’s Blues.

Barcelona-based bioengineering startup Novameat claims to have created the world’s first meat substitute composed of ingredients sourced from every one of the five kingdoms of living things. And it is a blue steak. Thanks to its patented texturizing technology, Novameat is able to replicate meat tissues, and it seeks to stake a claim in the untapped market of whole-cut alternative meats.

Around 62% of consumers in the U.S. are willing to embrace a flexitarian or reducetarian diets, which is mostly vegetarian but occasionally includes the consumption of meat products, a trend that is fueling the creation and sales of plant-based products. Growing interest in flexitarianism also creates opportunities for the development of hybrid meats, which is made up of a mix of plant-based ingredients and traditional animal-based meat. 

The hybrid meat market is now well supplied with alternatives such as burgers, meatballs, sausages, nuggets, and bacon strips and it is expected to be worth $162 billion by 2030: “There is a little bit of variety, but there is still a big white space,” says Novameat’s CEO Giuseppe Scionti, referring to the lack of options for whole-cuts.

Creating texturized meat products such as tenderloins, steaks, and fillets is more complex than producing plant-based ground meat patties and meatballs. Scionti started his career as an academic, studying the composition of animal tissue to be able to recreating tissue models such as muscle, skin, and blood vessels implants. While at the Research Center for Biomedical Engineering of Barcelona developing Novameat’s patented micro-extrusion technology, a sophisticated texturizing method, allowing to create a nanostructure that imitates the meat muscle, he decided to look into whether it could be used to replicate food items too. Back in 2020, the company introduced what it called the “most realistic” plant-based steak, a 3D printed steak of pea protein, beetroot juice and other plant-based ingredients. In 2021, the company made what it claimed to be the “biggest piece of cell-based whole cut analogue”.

When blending ingredients to create hybrid meat, the first priority is to come up with an enjoyable experience for consumers who do not want to give up the feeling of chewing a piece of meat. Building on the 3D printed steak experience, the company wanted to test whether they could create a hybrid product using multiple ingredients but without sourcing meat from traditional animal farming.  One key change in their process was to cool things down “By implementing a strategy that imitates the muscle very well, we don’t need to increase temperatures,” says Scionti. Working at low temperatures allows them to incorporate a wider variety of ingredients in the alternative meat formulations.

Their super-hybrid meat alternative combines lab-grown animal cells, plant-based ingredients, fungi, algae, and lastly spirulina, a blue bacteria belonging to the kingdom of unicellular organisms called “monera” that gives the meat its distinctive tint: “We chose the color with the purpose to create a futuristic-looking prototype,” says Scionti. With this invention, Scionti aims to usher people into the next phase of how the planet is going to eat: “We wanted to show that there are no limits. With our technology, we are able to create whole cuts and hybrid alternative meat products with a variety of ingredients,” he says.

The blue hybrid meat was produced in 5 minutes with a lab-scale 3D printer, but Scionti believes it can be replicated on a much larger scale. However, the company will primarily focus on expanding its portfolio of plant-based alternatives: “Our technology is scalable at industrial-level, we have recently proven to be able to produce 1 ton per hour of either plant-based or hybrid whole cuts of meat with industrial food equipment,” he continued, showing examples of the most recent meat-less tenderloins and steaks his team has created using the same technology.

In December 2021, Novameat was selected by the European Commission among European companies to receive part of the largest-ever funding round from the European Innovation Council Accelerator. The company won the grant with a project requesting $ 2 million, which will be dedicated to scaling up its production capabilities, and accelerating the launch of its plant-based whole cut products to market.

Limiting the production and consumption of meat is crucial to tackling the climate crisis. Currently, the meat industry is responsible for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production and around 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production. But other plant ingredients, such as soy, have faced backlashes due to their link to deforestation. Scionti believes that his company’s technology used to create plant-based and hybrid meats can avoid contributing to agriculture’s carbon footprint, the way other plant-based alternative meat products currently do: “We can bypass the need of soy, gluten, or GMOs, and work with very sensible natural ingredients such as those based on bacteria, algae, fungi, or animal cells,” he says.

Novameat faces scarce competition, as only a few other startups worldwide are currently able to create whole-cuts meat alternatives: U.S.-based startups Meati Food and Atlast are working with fungi, while the Dutch startup Rival Foods uses a technology able to compress powder from wheat, field beans or soy to make fillets and other options. Earlier in August, Australian startups Nourish and Vow launched their partnership to create hybrid meat combining lab-grown animal cells with fermented plant-based fats.