First Company To Lab Grow Meat - Clean & Cultured - Memphis Meats

Tyson Foods Invests In Lab-Grown Protein Startup Memphis Meats, Joining Bill Gates And Richard Branson. Lab-grown meat just got another big vote of confidence. Tyson Foods’ venture capital arm announced Monday that it has secured a minority investment in Memphis Meats, the buzzy startup that grows beef, chicken and duck meat with animal cells and petri dishes, no livestock required. Memphis Meats unveiled its lab-grown meatball in 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. San Francisco-based Memphis Meats unveiled a meatball grown in a lab in 2016, but has yet to commercialize a product. One big hurdle is the sheer cost of producing the meat - currently runs around $2,400 to produce a single pound of its meat, which is often called “cultured” or “clean.”

But a meat giant like Tyson, which sells about $30 billion a year of beef, poultry and pork, can help advise Memphis Meats on how to scale up. “We want to work with them to scale. Cost is the main focus for us,” Memphis Meats CEO and cofounder Uma Valeti told Forbes. “At the end point, it will be significantly cheaper than conventional meat.” Agribusiness conglomerate Cargill, the second-largest beef producer in the world, also invested in Memphis Meats in August 2017 (The dollar amount was not disclosed).

“For the first time, we’re replacing meat with meat - not a meat alternative. That gets Tyson and Cargill enormously excited because they're in the meat business. There’s the potential to transform feeding the world as we know it,” says Valeti. He first thought about growing meat without animals after his cardiology fellowship at Mayo Clinic in 2005 where he observed a clinical trial that successfully rebuilt damaged heart tissue with stem cells.

Tyson is using its $150 million venture fund to make long-term investments that will help the 82-year-old food company stay relevant and successful in the future. Memphis Meats is trying to figure out a way to increase protein production globally to meet demand from 10 billion global citizens by 2050 without exacerbating limited resources for farmland and livestock. Valeti estimates demand for meat will double in the next 30 years.

“If disruptions take place in the way that food is going to be developed or delivered in protein, in particular, Tyson Foods is going to be there,” Justin Whitmore, head of Tyson Ventures, told Forbes.

Prior to Tyson’s investment, Memphis Meats disclosed that it had raised at least $22 million.

It’s the second meat-alternative investment for Tyson Ventures, which launched in 2016 after Tyson invested $13 million for 5% of Beyond Meat, a plant-based protein startup that makes burgers sold by restaurant distributor Sysco and supermarkets like Whole Foods. Fellow Memphis Meats investor Gates, worth an estimated $92 billion, is also an investor in Beyond Meat. The startup is valued at around $300 million.

Forbes estimates that Tyson Foods Chairman John Tyson is worth $2.5 billion.

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