Eat Just Inc., the Bay Area startup behind the world's first commercially sold cell-cultivated meat, is teaming up with one of biotech's biggest builders to reach an unprecedented level of scale for the alternative protein industry.
The company's Good Meat division on Wednesday announced an exclusive multiyear contract with Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based ABEC to design, manufacture and install 10 bioreactors for what's envisioned to be the world's first large-scale cultivated meat facility. Terms of the contract were not disclosed.
The bioreactors — cylindrical steel tanks where the cell-cultivated production happens — will each be about as tall as a four-story building and have a capacity of 250,000 liters. They will be located in a facility expected to eventually produce up to 30 million pounds of so-called "slaughter-less" meat annually between its chicken and beef products.
Good Meat plans to finalize site selection for the facility in the next three months. It is expected to clock in at about 200,000 square feet and span 12 acres.
Currently, the world's largest facilities are pilot plants that feature tanks of several thousands of liters. Eat Just and others, such as competitor Upside Foods' EPIC plant in Emeryville and Wildtype Food's facility in Dogpatch, are in the process of building pilot plants around the Bay Area to test out production methods at scale.
The new Eat Just commercial facility is part of the industrywide push to match and eventually outpace price parity with conventional meat production; since 2018 Good Meat says it has achieved a 90% reduction in production costs.
ABEC, which developed some of the first production-scale bioreactors in the 1980s and the first-of-its-kind larger than 10,000 liters in the 1990s, is also developing Eat Just's bioreactors at its 40,000-square-foot pilot plant under construction adjacent to its new headquarters in Alameda's Marina Village Research Park. The company moved into the headquarters this spring; the pilot plant is scheduled to be operational in the fourth quarter.
ABEC is also developing for Eat Just a Singapore production facility slated to open in the first quarter of 2023.
Last week Eat Just announced a joint development agreement with global food processing giant ADM to optimize the nutrient feed for Good Meat's animal cells and the taste and texture of the final product — a first-of-its-kind partnership in the cell-cultivated meat space for ADM, long a partner of conventional meat operations. And on Monday Eat Just launched a new ad campaign for its Just Egg plant-based egg product, featuring actor Jake Gyllenhaal and tennis star Serena Williams, both investors in the brand.
To date Eat Just has raised just under $840 million from investors, including Bill Gates, Eduardo Saverin, Khosla Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and hedge fund UBS O'Connor.
Eat Just is in the thick of the development process for a cell-cultivated meat facility in Qatar via a partnership with the state-backed Doha Venture Capital and Qatar Free Zones Authority. That facility, whose plans were announced in August, is expected to take about two years and more than $200 million to complete.
