Launching into the Future: Our First Commercial-Scale Production of Cultivated Beef

Last year was a big year for SCiFi: we completed the construction and commissioning of our first manufacturing facility, right next door to our R&D Facility in San Leandro, California. Our manufacturing facility was designed from the ground up to pass FDA and USDA inspections, which will allow us to sell to consumers! This is monumental—SCiFi is the only company in the world with beef cell lines that grow in single-cell suspension, which enables us to scale our production of cultivated beef quickly and affordably. Our cell lines don’t require expensive substrates like microcarriers or scaffolding, which is essential for cost-effective scale-up (you can read more about our big suspension milestone here).?

We spent the past few months commissioning our facility, and we are excited today to announce the completion of our first 500L bioreactor run! This is the same scale that we’ll be commercializing out once we receive regulatory approval. We harvested kilograms of cultivated beef from a single run, in a process that was 100% serum-free. Those cells are going into blended products (our first ground beef product is 10% cultivated beef with 90% plant), allowing us to produce thousands of SCiFi Burgers every month in our manufacturing facility. And we couldn’t be more excited to start serving them to the public as soon as we get the green light!

Scale-up has been held up as a major risk factor for commercializing cultivated meat, which is why we put R&D effort into developing beef cell lines that grow in single-cell suspension. A huge benefit of single-cell suspension cell lines is that they can be grown in any standard, stir tank bioreactor, without the need to try and scale up novel hardware. Impressively, we had no problems scaling our cell lines from bench scale to our 500L bioreactor. In fact, we demonstrated higher yields in our 500L than what we saw in our smaller format bioreactors!

We’re working with regulators in the US to get approval to start selling our SCiFi ground beef ASAP. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep abreast of our progress!?