Major announcement: GFI launches in Japan!

International think-tank network the Good Food Institute has selected Japan as the location for its newest nonprofit entity. Japan will now join existing GFI affiliates in Singapore, India, Israel, Europe, Brazil, and the US, which work collaboratively to accelerate food innovation around the world.

With global meat production projected to increase by more than 50 percent by 2050 compared with 2012 levels, our food supply is on a collision course with planetary limits. Such pressures are particularly acute in Asia, which accounts for more than half of all protein consumption growth so far this century. That also means that the opportunity for large-scale transformation in the regional protein supply has never been greater.

Why Japan?

Alternative proteins made from plants, microbes, and cultivated animal cells have the ability to satisfy Asia’s skyrocketing meat demand in a more secure and sustainable way, says GFI Japan’s interim director, Kimiko Hong-Mitsui . “Just as Japan developed and exported the cutting-edge technologies that brought solar power and other renewables to the world, we now have an opportunity to pioneer the next generation of alternative proteins—the food equivalents of clean energy.”

Japan’s 101st Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, hailed alternative protein technologies, such as cultivated meat—meat produced directly from cells, without having to grow the whole animal—as an important part of “realizing a sustainable food supply.” His government also awarded tens of millions of dollars in funding to alternative protein companies, as part of a larger food-sustainability moonshot.

“Reimagining how meat is made is one of humanity’s greatest untapped opportunities,” says GFI president and founder Bruce Friedrich, who will address the prestigious Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto next week. “Japan’s world-class R&D ecosystem will play a critical role in supercharging alternative proteins and pioneering the breakthrough technologies our planet urgently needs.”

What will GFI Japan do?

Among GFI Japan’s top strategic priorities are:?

• Identifying opportunities for greater government investment in alternative protein R&D and commercialisation, including in the national bioeconomy strategy.
• Supporting local regulators’ efforts to develop a clear path to market for cultivated meat.
• Better connecting Japan’s ‘future food’ companies to their international counterparts.
• Providing timely translations of relevant reports and resources .
• Facilitating new collaborations between Japanese research institutions and alternative protein scientists around the globe.??

Visit GFIJapan.org , sign up for their newsletter , and follow GFI Japan on LinkedIn

GFI’s arrival in Japan has been a long time coming and represents our latest move to lean in on Asia as an epicentre of alternative protein innovation.?

As a team of GFI APAC experts and partners wrote last week in a guest column for Nature —one of the most-read and prestigious scientific journals in the world—Asian innovation hubs like Japan “have the capacity, workforce, and incentives to achieve taste parity for plant-based meat, resolve technical challenges, and take cultivated meat from test kitchens to supermarkets around the world.”