Archer Daniels Midland is partnering with a lab-grown meat start-up as the US agricultural trader expands its alternative protein business, further diversifying the company beyond trading and processing agricultural commodities.
The Chicago-headquartered group has entered into a joint development agreement with California-based Eat Just, which became the world’s first lab-grown meat maker to receive regulatory approval after its chicken product was given the nod by Singaporean food authorities in late 2020.
The bulk of ADM’s revenue comes from trading agricultural commodities such as corn and soyabeans, and producing edible oils, sweeteners and biofuels. But the group has been expanding its speciality ingredients business in recent years as it looks at future growth markets.
It is particularly focused on areas such as alternative proteins, including plant-based and lab-grown meats, as climate change limits growth of livestock production despite rising demand for meat.
“The alternative protein market continues to grow at a rapid pace, and we’re investing in a wide variety of new technologies and new partners to stay on the cutting edge of what’s next in this space,” said Leticia Gonçalves, president of ADM’s global foods business.
ADM was working with Eat Just to lower its cost of production as well as tailoring its cultured meat products for various markets when they received regulatory approval, she added.
Lab-grown or “cultured” meat is made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors, and differs from plant-based meat substitutes, which are made from ingredients including pea or soyabean protein. Eat Just’s lab-grown chicken is still the only cultured meat product which has won regulatory approval and is offered to consumers commercially.
But the amount of meat the start-up can produce has been constrained by various factors including cost. Eat Just, which will sell less than 1,000lbs of lab-grown chicken this year, wants to use the tie-up to scale-up its operations, increasing annual production to 30mn lbs.
Eat Just said the agricultural trader’s expertise in ingredients would help remove this cost barrier as well as creating new types of cultivated chicken.
“The strategic partnership is really going to accelerate large scale commercialisation,” said Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Eat Just.
One of the hurdles that many lab-grown meat starts-ups face is the cost of the feed in which cells grow. Most are using traditional serum-based feed that is mixed with extremely expensive pharmaceutical-grade materials and these high prices have been an operational bottleneck for start-ups.
Other agricultural companies have also invested in food-tech start-ups. Cargill has backed cultured meat start-ups as well as plant-based protein ingredient makers, while Louis Dreyfus Company has invested in an alternative protein flavouring start-up and a plant-based seafood maker.
ADM’s alternative protein investments include Israeli cultured meat firm Future Meat and a start-up which makes protein from microbes found in Yellowstone National Park’s volcanic hot springs.
It also has a partnership with Perfect Day, which uses microbial fermentation to make animal-free, bioidentical dairy protein. ADM said it collaborated with alternative protein start-ups by providing fermentation expertise, ingredients and commercial-scale manufacturing capabilities.