ISRAEL – SuperMeat, an Israeli biotech and food-tech company, has received a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority, to partially help it set up what it hails as the largest open high-throughput screening system for cultivated meat media ingredients, supplements, and cell scaffolds for cultivated meat production.

The system will allow SuperMeat to screen “hundreds of thousands of materials every month”, helping identify the highest quality ingredients with the lowest costs, according to the company.

The grant will also allow SuperMeat to leverage the cultivated meat production technology it has built to help reduce costs and provide the cultivated meat industry an open platform for commercialization through its strategic partners globally.

In order to achieve its goal, SuperMeat has also partnered with Thermo Fisher Scientific, which provided the world’s most advanced screening platform and will support the development and operation of the system.

SuperMeat said that it aims to offer an “open standard” for cell feed ingredients that can be used by cultivated meat companies around the world moving toward commercialization by optimizing the ingredients for the cell feed, also known as growth media.

SuperMeat’s latest expansion announcement follows very closely two strategic partnerships furthering its momentum toward commercialization.

Most recently the company announced a strategic partnership with Ajinomoto, a global food ingredient and biotechnology leader, to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cell-based meat industry.

It has also signed a memorandum of understanding with PHW Group, one of Europe’s largest poultry producers, to manufacture and distribute cultivated meat at a large scale for European consumers.

The backing of the Israeli government to SuperMeat comes on the heels of an announcement from the Dutch government of funding €60 million (US$65 million) through its National Growth Fund to build up the cellular meat and agriculture ecosystem, last month.

The ecosystem around cellular agriculture is the technology to produce animal products like milk and meat directly from cells.

The funding will be used mainly to invest in education and innovation in this emerging industry and represents the largest public funding globally in the cellular agriculture field.

The funding will also stimulate the burgeoning industry, which is hailed as the most promising future food tech to move society away from relying on animal-based ingredients.

This is an initial step toward finding a more significant growth plan which plans to invest €252 to €382 million (US$272 million to US$413 million) in cellular agriculture.

The broader growth plan is projected to generate an incremental €10 to €14 billion (US$10.9 million to US$14 million) in Dutch GDP growth per year by 2050, with significant global climate, environmental, and health benefits.

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