Delft startup Meatable launches first product: Cultured pork sausage

The Delft start-up, Meatable, has developed its first product made from cultured meat. The pork sausage should leave factories and hit store shelves in Singapore by 2025. The company hopes to be able to soon serve more markets in the rest of the world, said technical director and co-founder Daan Luining. He was recently able to eat the cultured meat for the first time. "It tastes good. We want everyone to taste this."

That may soon be possible, because the Tweede Kamer adopted a motion in March to make tastings possible under certain circumstances. With this, companies such as Meatable can present their products to their own product testers, but also consumers. "This way we can further improve the product," said Luining.

Still, the factory-made meat already tastes good, in his opinion. "It tastes like…just meat really. And the great thing is I could eat this with the pig it's made from sitting next to me on the couch."

Singapore was chosen as the first market, because the Asian country wants to quickly become self-sufficient. "They are open to innovation and it is a relatively small country with a prosperous population." Luining expects approval in Europe to take longer, but if the company can start there earlier, Europe will be the first market. In any case, Meatable 's cultured meat should be on the shelves in the Netherlands before 2030.

Although the start-up has pork sausages as its first product, it is also looking at beef. "Actually, you can make all the meat we eat in a factory with our technology, including salmon or tuna," explained Luining. That factory looks a bit like a brewery, he said. "We give our cells nutrients and that happens in large boilers."

The fact that the first product is a sausage also has to do with the production process. "It's easier to make processed meat than whole cuts of meat, like pork tenderloin or ham steaks."

Luining expects that Meatable's cultured meat will initially be slightly more expensive than regular meat, but that it will eventually become cheaper. "But we are much more environmentally friendly because our cells only get nutrients. Moreover, we have no nitrogen or methane emissions and there are no antibiotics in our meat."

Meatable foresees that cultured meat can simply coexist with normal meat. "The world population is still growing and it needs to be fed. We want to play a role in that. The demand for proteins is increasing."