Jan-2021
Caro Meats Creates New Form of Cultivated Meat
Biomedics claim to have developed a new form of cultivated meat using a method that promises more natural flavour and texture than other alternatives.
Innovation in the nascent but rapidly growing cultivated meat sector (also known as culture, cell-based, slaughter-free and clean meat ) has thus far focused excessively on the minced meat format. So believes Ravi Selvaganapathy, founder of Caro Meats and researcher at McMaster Univesrity’s School of Biomedical Engineering in Canada.
The current methods of cultivated meat culture muscle cells and add fat and other additives such as binders to extrude the mix into a fibrous form that looks and feels like ground meat, which is then packed into a burger.
Instead, Caro Meats have devised a way to make meat by stacking thin sheets of cultivated muscle and fat cells grown together in a lab setting. The technique is adapted from a method used to grow tissue for human transplants.
“We focused on a method where the cells themselves produce the fibrous texture by forming myofibres as they fuse with each other and incorporating fat cells in the tissue directly so that they are influenced by the muscle cells and produce the right complement of the fat molecules that would constitute the taste.”
“This approach tries to simulate the natural process of muscle tissue formation and can produce large area contiguous tissue akin to slab meat than minced meat format that is prevalent in the industry.”
The sheets of living cells, each about the thichness of a sheet of printer paper, are first grwon in culture and then concentrated on growth plates before being peeled off and stacked or folded together. The sheets naturally bond to one another before the cells die.The layers can be stacked into a solid piece of any thickness, and ‘tuned’ to replicate the fat content and marbling of any cut of meat – an advantage over other alternatives.
“We are creating slabs of meat” Selvaganapathy said. “Consumers will be able to buy meat with whatever percentage of fat they like – just like they do with milk.”
Read the full article in FoodNavigator here