Future Meat Closes $347 Million Funding Round

Adrianne DeLuca

Isreali food tech company Future Meat announced today it has raised $347 million in Series B funding co-led by ADM Ventures, the investment arm of global food processing company Archer-Daniels-Midland, with participation from Menora Mivtachim, S2G Ventures, Tyson New Ventures, among others. The company also announced it has accelerated past cost reduction timelines for its cultivated chicken breast and plans to bring large-scale production to the United States.

“This financing consolidates Future Meat’s position as the leading player in the cultivated meat industry, just three years after our launch,” said Professor Yaakov Nahmias, founder and president of Future Meat, in a press release. “Our singular technology reduced production costs faster than anyone thought possible, paving the way for a massive expansion of operations. Our team will break ground on the first-of-its-kind, large-scale production facility in the United States in 2022.”

In June, the company opened its first production facility in Israel which it claims is the “world’s first industrial cultured meat facility” with the capacity to produce the equivalent of 5,000 hamburgers a day. Alongside today’s announcement, Future Meat said it is now scouting U.S. locations to open a large-scale production facility.

Many of the company’s lead investors have been active in the alt-protein space including ADM Ventures, which in 2020 launched PlantPlus, a joint venture with Brazilian beef processor Marfrig, to “accelerate plant-based protein category growth.” Two additional plant-based protein brands – Sol Cuisine and Hilary’s – have since been acquired under the PlantPlus name.

“We’re excited to expand our relationship with Future Meat and expand the universe of new sources of protein to consumers who are increasingly diversifying their diets,” said Ian Pinner, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at ADM, in a press release. “Partnerships like these are one of the key ways ADM is creating and capturing new value in growth segments like alternative proteins, and we’re eager to support the Future Meat team in their efforts to continue developing groundbreaking solutions that will provide high-quality and scalable cultivated meat products to consumers in the years to come.”

Additionally, Tyson New Ventures has invested heavily in both cell-cultured and plant-based protein alternatives. The investment arm of the global food company also serves as an investor in California-based cell-cultured meat maker Upside Foods and was an early investor in plant-based protein maker Beyond Meat.

However, according to Future Meat, its technology is “leading the pack” in the development and cultivation of animal-based protein alternatives. Unlike competing producers, the company’s fermentation technology uses connective tissues rather than stem cells, an approach that, when coupled with the company’s proprietary process, increases the cost-efficiency of production and allows it to surpass the “cost parity with traditional meat” that has restrained growth across the rest of the industry.

“We have consistently demonstrated that our single-cell technology and serum-free media formulations can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipates,” added Nahmias in the release. “We also demonstrated that our proprietary media rejuvenation technology enables cell densities greater than 100 billion cells per liter, translating to production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard.”

Future Meat said it can now produce a chicken breast for $7.70 per pound, a significant savings compared to the $18 per pound rate it was producing at six months ago. This reduction surpasses the 18-month timelines the company set in May, a month before opening its first production facility.

The announcement comes amid continued discussions by the USDA and FDA about labeling requirements for animal-cell-cultured products. The agencies have previously announced their intent to have “joint oversight” in the cultivation, production and packaging process of animal-cell-cultured products. While the majority of seafood products technically fall under FDA jurisdiction and the remaining seafood, meat and poultry products are subject to USDA rules, the agencies stated they will work together to develop labeling principles for all products made using cell culture technology; however, these principles have not yet been released.