Mirai Foods produces first cultivated beef steak

According to a press release from Mirai Foods, a startup from Wädenswil in the canton of Zurich, it has been able to create thick, soft fillet steaks from cultivated beef. Christoph Mayr, CEO and Co-Founder of Mirai Foods, commented: “Other types of meat can already be produced in the lab. A fillet steak is the ultimate challenge: it consists of different cell types, which - if combined correctly - result in a complex meat structure.”

Mirai Foods developed a bioreactor for this development called The Rocket. It creates long, fully mature muscle fibers, combines them using enzymes, and supplements them with cultivated fat structures. The company has already registered three patents for its fibration technology.

Suman Das, CSO and Co-Founder of Mirai Foods, stated: “Nutrition is a huge lever for greater climate protection and animal welfare: demand for meat is expected to double by 2050; conventional methods of meat production cannot meet this demand at all, and certainly not in a sustainable way.”

Mirai Foods has already raised more than 5 million US dollars in a seed funding round. Now, it has announced that additional investors have become involved, including the Zurich-based food and meat producer Angst AG. The company is currently concentrating on the cultivation of beef because conventional beef has the largest footprint of all meats. However, the long-term plan is to cultivate a range of meat types. hs