We tasted the first lab-grown sausage from New Age Meats. The startup just revealed the cost

New Age Meats’ Andra
Necula (L) and sausage chef Matt Murphy prepare the startup’s
first public tasting of lab-grown sausage.
Katie Canales/Business Insider

• Silicon Valley startup New Age Meats made history in
  September by
  letting journalists taste the first cell-based pork sausage
  made in a lab.
• Making meat without slaughter has been the
  primary objective of several companies since Dutch
  scientist Mark Post made the
  first “lab-grown” hamburger in 2013.
• This week, the company revealed a rough idea of how
  much the sausage costs to make and announced progress on
  nailing a formula that addresses one of the “holy grails” of
  clean meat.

On a crisp fall day in San Francisco, a startup called
New Age Meats let people see how its sausage gets made —
without butchering any animals.

In September, the company let a handful of journalists and
prospective investors taste its prototype pork sausages, which
had been made from animal cells brewed up in a piece of machinery
akin to a small brewer’s vat. And now, the
company says it’s making progress on getting the meat to your
table at an affordable price.

Several
other companies have been aiming to make a product like
New Age Meats’ sausage since the creation of the
first burger
made from cow cells in 2013. They hope to slash waste,
curb pollution, and improve animal and human health.

This week at an event organized by the Silicon Valley biotech
funding hub
IndieBio, Brian Spears, New Age Meats’ founder, revealed
roughly how much the sausage now costs to make and announced
progress on nailing a formula that addresses one of the “holy
grails” of clean meat.

Sausage without slaughter

Last month, Spears and co-founder Andra Necula
served their freshly cooked pork-sausage links — which had
been made using fat and muscle cells generated from a single
sample of a live pig named Jessie — to 40 journalists and
prospective investors.

New Age Meats’ pork
sausage sizzles in a pan.
Katie
Canales/Business Insider

The company started just three months ago with $250,000 in seed
funding from
IndieBio, the accelerator that also gave cultured-meat
startup
Memphis Meats its start.

“We really thought, ‘Do we want to invest in another
cultured-meat startup?'” Arvind Gupta, IndieBio’s cofounder, told
Business Insider in September. “But after we met the team and saw
what they could do, we had to.”

“This is the most product and the fastest production from any
cultured-meat startup we’ve seen so far,” Gupta said.

As Spears, a chemical engineer by training, and Necula, a cell
biologist, watched, the sausage sizzled in a pan with a little
grapeseed oil. Slowly, it began to brown on each side like
conventional sausage. The room filled with the smell of breakfast
meat. After a few minutes — just before the sausage casing began
to blister — we dug into our bite-sized samples.

It tasted like meat. Then again, it is meat.

The texture was distinctly sausage-like. After I’d chewed my
bite, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to tell the difference
between this pork sausage and any other. Perhaps it was a little
drier, a little more crumbly? It was hard to tell from just one
bite, but I was pretty sure there were no glaring differences.

New Age Meats says its pork sausage is 12x cheaper to make today
than it was a month ago

Brian Spears and Andra
Necula co-founded New Age Meats.
Courtesy of New Age Meats

Despite their hard work, Spears and Necula face many obstacles on
the road to producing cost-effective clean meat. The two biggest
hurdles involve making enough of the product affordably and
nailing the meat’s recipe and texture.

Back in 2013, when Dutch scientist Mark Post became the first
person in the world to make a beef burger from cow cells, his
patty
cost $330,000 to produce. Slashing that to a price that
consumers would be willing to pay, even at a high-end restaurant,
is still at least three years away,
according to several investors in the leading companies in
the space.

But this week, Spears said the meat was inching closer to being
made at a cost of about $5 per breakfast sausage link. That’s
about $23 per pound — still far pricier than than any other
sausage or vegetarian sausage on the market but much closer to
the goal that most of these companies are looking to hit.

For context, Spears revealed that each one of the three New
Age Meats prototype sausage links they served at their
tasting event in September cost $2,500 to produce, or roughly
$11,400 per pound. That’s some 500 times more expensive than
their goal and about five times pricier than Memphis Meats’
product which according to Wired cost
$2,400 per pound in March.

Yet already, only about a month after the tasting event, Spears
said they’d slashed that cost to $216 per sausage, or roughly
$980 per pound. That means the meat is roughly 12 times cheaper
to produce today than it was a month ago, less than half the cost
of Memphis Meats, and roughly 1,500 times cheaper than Post’s
burger.

Part of the cost problem has to do with the food these startups
are feeding their farm-free animal cells, another hurdle that
Spears announced that his company had made progress in clearing
this week.

Me trying my first
lab-grown sausage.
Katie
Canales/Business Insider

Many companies still use something called fetal bovine serum
(FBS), a standard and relatively inexpensive lab medium made from
the blood of pregnant slaughtered cows. To live up to their goal
of replacing animal slaughter, these startups will need to find
something new and slaughter-free that costs the same or less.

And while the prototype sausages that New Age Meats served at its
September event were made using FBS, Spears said this week that
the company planned to nail a serum-free recipe within two
months.

Another issue with cell-based meat is the products’ texture.

Making a sausage, patty, fish cake, or any other product that
combines several ingredients with ground meat or seafood is
nowhere near as difficult as
mimicking the complex texture and flavor of a steak or a
chicken breast. To do that, startups will likely need to take
many of their cues from regenerative medicine, where scientists
strive to heal or grow real human tissues and organs. Applying
those tools to the world of cultured meat could result in the
first farm-free products that chew, slice, and taste like a
traditional steak or thigh.

For this reason, Necula said she and Spears planned to continue
working in the realm of sausage-like items, but they’re exploring
options that include products made with beef, pork, and crab.

Several other startups appear to be making headway on their first
cultured-meat products as well.

The CEO of
Just, a Silicon Valley startup formerly known as Hampton
Creek, recently tweeted a photo that appeared to show a prototype
of its first cultured-chicken nuggets;
Memphis Meats, the Silicon Valley startup that claimed it
made the first lab-grown chicken and duck products in 2017,
invited me to a tasting of its products before the year’s end.
And New Age Meats
made history with the first semi-public tasting of its
sausage in September.

“How did we move so quickly?” Spears, an engineer, asked this
week. “Because we were designed to.”

This article is an updated version of a story that was
originally published on Sept. 18, 2018.