• SCiFi Foods (previously Artemys Foods), a California-based startup developing cell-cultured beef, announced it has achieved a R&D milestone by creating beef cells that can adapt to be grown in single-cell line suspensions, as opposed to being grown on the surface of microcarriers. The company achieved this by combining its own high-throughput cell line engineering with CRISPR technology.

• The company claimed this breakthrough will allow it to reduce the cost of growing beef cells by more than 1,000x, allowing them to achieve price parity. SCiFi further predicts that it will be able to introduce its first product—a blended plant-based and cultivated meat burger—for under USD 10 at its upcoming pilot plant and further reduce it to USD 1 once it achieves large-scale production.

• SCiFi Foods expects its pilot plant to be complete and operational by 2H 2024 and is hopeful of receiving regulatory clearance from the US Government for the sale of cell-cultured food.

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: SCiFi Foods was in stealth mode until June 2022 when they emerged with the news of having raised USD 22 million in Series A funding marking the largest Series A funding round in the cell-cultured sector for 1H 2022. The funding appears to be used efficiently, as one of their planned uses for the funding was toward scaling up R&D efforts.</ul>