Israeli start-up that wants us to eat lab-grown chicken

Process should result in chicken meat indistinguishable from what we eat now, reports Tech in Asia

A start-up wants to end our addiction to unsafe and unhygienic chicken by providing a sustainable alternative – a kind of super meat created in a machine. The team, based in Israel, is developing tech which can create cultured meat from chicken cells in a safe environment, completely independent from the animal’s body.

Koby Barak, the CEO of Supermeat, explains that cultured meat is the ability to grow traditional meat products from animal cells. The company plans on developing a device that can help make cultured meat a commercial reality.

The entrepreneur says that current cell culture techniques – like with that lab-grown burger that stunned the world back in 2013 – are wasteful and result in costs of up to US$100,000 per kg.

The meat used in that lab-grown burger is now expected to hit shelves at a price of US$80 per Kg, but that’s not for another 20 to 30 years.

What the Israeli team is trying to do instead is take biopsy samples from chickens and segregate them into separate cells which will proliferate in culture. Scientists will then form tiny tissues from the cells and grow them organically into full-size tissue. The process should result in chicken meat indistinguishable from what we eat now.

Supermeat is tackling a huge problem. An estimated 10 billion chickens are slaughtered every year in the US alone; it’s predicted that their growth, slaughter, and transportation accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

The start-up has launched a crowdfunding campaign which, at the time of writing, has reached 63% of its goal with two months left to run.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here