Key facts:
- BioTech Foods, a Spanish startup, received a grant from the EU commission
- BioTech Foods is working on lab-grown pork (under the brand Ethicameat)
- Part of an international consortium named Meat4All, including a French supplier, this group of companies will receive €2.7M
- This is the first major European-level public grant financing a project aiming at producing cellular agriculture food at scale. Previous fundings existed but were of a more limited scale or directed toward pharmaceuticals or beauty (skin) aspects.
Why it matters – DigitalFoodLab’s opinion:
This funding comes just after the announcement of the EU commission’s Green Deal objective of making the EU “climate-neutral” by 2050. It obviously resonates with clean meat startups’ goals, which could help reduce the impact of our meat consumption on the environment drastically. Indeed, livestock contributes to 18% of the climate change in CO2 equivalent.
Moreover, like many, we were skeptics about Europe’s interest in these clean meat technologies, as many European countries refuse GMOs and intensive farming. We may have been wrong, and Europe’s ambitious green goals and environmentally friendly policies will make people more attracted than expected by cultured meat.
