BioTech Foods’ investMEAT project, focused on research in cell lines, cultured media and biomaterials that allows scaling up cultivated meat production to the industrial level, has just obtained the support of the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX).
Through its ‘Innova Invest’ line of aid for R&D, ICEX will provide a €753,000 grant for this research, with the goal of keeping production costs within suitable ranges so cultivated meat reaches end consumer at competitive prices.
«Results will contribute to the development of the first cultivated meat industrial production plant in Spain, and one of the most state of the art in the world,» says Iñigo Charola, co-founder and CEO of the company.
Cultivated meat companies work with the most prominent emerging technologies for facing global challenges such as sustainable food production. They are working to overcome several needs for scalability and efficiency at an industrial level.
As the CEO of BioTech Foods explains: «One of the big challenges in the market is producing in appropriate volume and cost. Protein from cultivated meat will be an option, as sustainable food, if the consumer can afford it«.
In this line, the project led by BioTech Foods, ‘Research on cell lines, cultured media and biomaterials for their correct bioprocessing to enable the production of cultivated meat’ (investMEAT)’ will allow a highly efficient cultivated meat production line, which will solve the challenges of current technology linked to scalability.
Promoting new R&D centres
As part of the Spanish Government’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the purpose of this first edition of ICEX’s ‘Innova Invest’ program is to prioritize projects that involve new R&D centers in Spain.
It should be recalled that, following the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Member States of the European Union approved the Next Generation EU package of measures, based on which the Government of Spain has drawn up this Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, which includes ten driving policies focused on those productive sectors with the greatest capacity to transform the economic and social fabric.
Spain is in the European top 5 for foodtech investment
The foodtech sector has been consolidated over the last year as a lever for the Spanish food industry. Thus, Spain’s foodtech ecosystem, which includes cellular agriculture for the production of alternative proteins such as cultivated meat, is the 5th largest in terms of public and private investment in Europe after Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, according to the ICEX report ‘Foodtech in Spain: Moving the Spanish Food System Forward’. The same study points out that Spanish startups have tripled their investment in 2021 (€695 million) compared to the previous year.
BioTech Foods is a pioneering company that is driving a revolution in the global food market. Our goal is to meet a new trend that demands products that are “Good for you, better for all”. BioTech Foods products can be processed in multiple different ways for consumption, such as sausages, burgers, nuggets and many more. BioTech Foods technology is based on growing tissue, similar to that produced in the animal’s body. This growth is based on the multiplication process naturally present in the cells of any living being.
