This startup wants to grow your steak in a lab, but struggles with expensive tech

The team behind ShojinMeat.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Disrupting Japan where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with Japanese entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Today, we’re going to talk about the future of meat. Many would say the future of humanity, but really, today we’re just going to talk about the meat. Yuki Hanyu and his team at ShojinMeat are growing meat in the lab and they’re doing it at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Here, we dive into the actual science behind cellular agriculture. If you can follow all of it, it means you’re a huge biology nerd, and I love you for it. Otherwise, it would be good just to let the science wash over you. It’s a pretty amazing topic.

Another thing we talk about is why Japanese life science startups have such a hard time both raising money and growing here in Japan.

What is ShojinMeat? 

“We are a collection of volunteer students, artists, and people of various disciplines to develop cultured meat technology.

“So the basic idea of cultured meat is quite simple. Basically, you take this animal [and] get a few cells from that animal. It could be chicken, beef, pork—anything. You don’t even need to kill that animal. You take the few cells and then you get this into a culture medium and grow the cells in the culture medium. And, in the end, you get a mass of cells, which is basically meat.

“[…] More specifically, there’s a special type of cell called myosatellite cells or myoblast cells. And those cells are so called the stem cell of muscle cells.

“For experiments, we’re using mostly muscles cells, and for actual food development work, we’re using chicken now.

“And the beauty’s the method that we discovered for mouse is actually directly applicable to chicken cells as well, and so is it for cattle, pork, or anything.

“The time it would [take to grow a 200-gram chicken would] be about 20 days, but the money is the very important part because, with the current technology, it costs ridiculous amounts, such as US$10,000, US$20,000 or something. It’s very, very expensive. And making that cheap is the most important technological hurdle.”

Tell us about yourself and why you made the change from being a researcher at Toshiba to growing meat?

“Well, the idea of culturing meat has been around for longer. And for me personally, I already knew the idea when I was five or eight [years old] reading science fiction manga.

“[…] I was also fascinated with all the kilometers, skyscrapers, star shapes, and those things. Well, general science fiction that a lot of young boys are into. I somehow never grew from it and just kept going. My degree [from] Oxford was [in] Chemistry—more into organic and biological. And with that, I moved into battery research. It was so science fiction—[like] a mid-21st  [century] science fiction where everywhere is covered with solar panels […].

“After that, I realized that I actually needed to study systems engineering in addition to my specialty in chemistry, battery technology—those things. That’s why I went into Toshiba, which is a research development center […]. And then I came to the [point when] I had to choose which science fiction dream I should pursue.

And what does the name ShojinMeat mean? 

What’s your business model now? How are you making money to fund your company? 

What are the big problems you face and how will you solve them?

How do you see this technology rolling out over the next five, 10, or 20 years? 

If I gave you a magic wand and I said you could change one thing about Japan, what would you change?

Conclusion