Delaware-based Livestock Labs is working to create cell lines for the cultivated meat industry.
Cell lines, when put in the right environment, multiply over time to create meat. They will eventually be available for purchase to companies wanting to grow meat in labs or factories, for consumption or experimentation.
Livestock Labs kicked off in 2023 with researcher Steen Ooi and, shortly after, co-founder Andrew Sayles teamed up with Ooi to enter the cultivated meat industry.
The company is currently in the research and development phase, according to Sayles. The goal is to create a product that delivers in taste and nutrition.
“Because it's grown in this sterile bioreactor where you're only growing the critical tissue types that you want – muscle, fat and connective tissue – you don't have to cook out any pathogens because there are no pathogens,” Sayles said. “So you're really getting almost sashimi grade, whatever meat you're developing.”
Sayles added there are plenty of reasons to support the cultivated meat industry right now.
“We simply do not have the land or the water or the planetary resources to really meet that demand as more nations are developing and wanting more meat,” Sayles said. “And so this is a way to absolutely supplement conventional meat.”
Meat demand is expected to increase by more than 50 percent between 2013 and 2050, according to Our World in Data.
Industrial animal agriculture calls for a massive amount of feed crops. A 2024 study from UC Davis found cultivated meat production is not inherently environmentally friendly without further technological innovations to address greenhouse gas outputs.
CE Delft, a Dutch company, conversely finds cultivated meat could produce 93 percent less air pollution, and use up to 95 percent less land and 78 percent less water.
“It is in this closed loop system,” Sayles said. “You don't need to mass produce and mono crop certain products that have a tough efficient food-in versus food-out efficiency rate… And the chicken, the most efficient animal in the world, is about nine calories in a feed per one calorie out as food, where cultivating meat at even some pilot scale test is three calories in per one calorie out.”
But there are more problems here, namely that innovation across several fields needs to happen in order to support cultivated meat. That goes from bioreactors – the machines that sustain life including the cell lines that eventually become meat – to the cell lines themselves.
“We could create a bacon with omega-3 fatty acids instead of trans fat, which right now is known as a group one carcinogen up there with smoking cigarettes,” Sayles said.
These kinds of innovations take funding – and a lot of it.
“A lot of funding started with investments,” Sayles said. “So with venture capital investments, angel funding investments and then a lot of government funding,” Sayles listed. “... And I'm optimistic that we are going to see this government funding [continue] as I look at cultivated meat and the race for the future of protein similar to the next space race.”
Livestock Labs started in San Francisco and moved all the way to Delaware. As part of the grant with Wilmington’s Innovation Space, the company has a license for the space that charges $1 per month for laboratory rental. That will last for two years and gives staff access to equipment at the Dupont space.
