Dutch foodtech firm to debut cultivated pork in Singapore next year

The Meatable sausage, developed with plant-based butcher Love Handle, that’s one-third cultivated meat and two-thirds plant-based meat / Photo credit: Meatable

Meatable, a Netherlands-based foodtech firm, is debuting cultivated pork products in Singapore by the second quarter of 2024, the firm announced at its first public tasting today.

The products, which include pork sausages and dumplings, are a hybrid of plant-based and cultivated meats and are co-developed with plant-based butcher Love Handle. They are also already in production with local manufacturer Esco Aster. Its price point will be comparable to organic meats.

Using its patented opti-ox technology, Meatable isolates pluripotent stem cells from live animals without harm, multiplies them in a controlled environment, and differentiates them into fat and muscle tissue, which give meat products their distinctive taste and texture.

The firm said that it takes just eight days to convert a cell into a sausage – 30x faster than it takes to rear a pig on a farm.

Meatable said it chose Singapore because of its “forward-thinking approach to novel food.” The city-state is the first country to approve lab-grown meat sales.

Caroline Wilschut, Meatable’s chief commercial officer, said cultivated meats are a “step up” from plant-based meats given that they are made from real animal cells with “real meat and real fat.”

That said, the firm is going to market with a hybrid product, made of a combination of both cultivated meat and plant-based meat. Wilschut explained that this lets the firm “bring the product to the market faster,” with lower costs and more available ingredients.

Meatable’s next target is the US, but Wilschut said that there’s an export opportunity to countries like China and Japan – once their regulatory systems mature – from a production base in Singapore. As pork is one of the world’s most consumed meats, Meatable COO Hans Huistra said the firm will initially focus on manufacturing cultivated pork, with a beef line to follow.

To date, the company has raised US$95 million in funding from investors such as agritech VC firm Agronomics as well as Taavet Hinrikus, the chairman and founder of fintech firm Wise.

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