We tasted the cultivated pork meat sausage from Meatable
It is not news that cultivated meat isn’t yet approved in Europe, yet we are here at the Dutch food tech company Meatable in the city of Leiden, munching tiny bits of sausage produced in their lab just a few meters away.
For the first time on European Union soil, a first pre-approval cultured meat tasting takes place in the EU country where scientists have pioneered the frontiers of biotech since the early 2010s, waiting for this moment for a long time.
Krijn de Nood, founder and CEO of Meatable says, however, this should be remembered as ‘an ordinary day, eating an ordinary pork sausage’, warning us this experience might be underwhelming: this is just regular meat, made in a lab.
The hybrid sausage we taste contains 28% cultivated pork fat, while the rest of the ingredients are plant-based: it is tender as we sample them just after they’ve sizzled in the pan in the office’s kitchen.
But for the team members it is a crucial moment: “We are incredibly proud to host the first official cultivated meat tasting in the European Union, marking a landmark moment for Meatable and our industry. (...) We now have the opportunity to verify those findings and further optimize our product before mass-market entry,” said Krijn de Nood, founder and CEO of Meatable during the event.
The cultured meat sausage was already sampled by not more than 50 people in Singapore, as the company is seeking product approval in the Asian country. But for Meatable, holding a tasting in their birthplace is something else: “It is a big moment as this represents five years of our work,” de Nood said.
Meatable laboratory and few of its lab team members, just in front of the main office area.
Rules of the cultivated meat game
Over ten years passed since the first cultivated burger was assembled in 2013 in the Netherlands, yet nobody had the chance to taste it then.
The European Union’s legislation requires companies wishing to sell any food that has not been on European tables before 1995 to submit a complex yet thorough scientific analysis of the product to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) before it is consumed by European citizens.
The dossier should explain the product's composition and prove the ingredients contained, or that the food item is not dangerous for human health.
But the same rules apply not just to commercialize products, but also to barely taste them. This reveals complicated for those willing to place new products to the market, but unable to tell if the products is any good.
Therefore Dutch lawmakers worked since 2022 on a parliamentary resolution to enable tastings of cultured meat under controlled conditions within The Netherlands.
When Dutch company Mosa Meat launched the world's largest cultivated lab center in May 2023, it was too early to allow its guests to taste its cultivated beef burger. Michelin chef Hans van Wolde gave a cooking demonstration, where a couple of burgers were grilled on a cooking plate: no guests could taste the sizzling meat, but at least they could sniff the resemblance to the meat smell.
In July 2023, Dutch legislators overturned this rule, allowing companies to conduct tastings in controlled environments. This move ensures that scientists understand what they produce, and potential consumers can decide whether to try or invest in it.
Meatable seized the opportunity to arrange food tastings of its alt-protein pork sausage on its premises, following the Code of Practice for Safely Conducting Tastings of Cultivated Foods Prior to EU Approval, from the independent expert committee within Cellular Agriculture Netherlands (CANS).
The Meatable sausages cook in the frying pan.
Tasting essentials
Meatable houses over 90 employees, but the majority were requested to work from home on the tasting day: “Though, inside the lab there are people as cells cannot feed themselves or go on holiday,” said Daan Luining, cofounder and CTO at Meatable, as we toured the laboratory.
The cells used to produce their cultivated products are not extracted from live animals, rather they derive from the fertilization of sow’s eggs. Meatable’s patented opti-ox™ technology enables these pig embryonic stem cells, to grown in conditions that allow them to expand to large numbers rapidly and without harming animals.
In March 2023, the company affirmed that their differentiation production process of high-quality fat and muscle tissue can be carried from eight days down to four, a faster process than any other companies in the industry.
The cells that brew in the lab’s fermentors are fed with a nutrient medium, and when they reach the correct size, the white-colored substance is collected and stored, before it is combined with the plant-based ingredient.
The tasting plate ate during our interview with Daan Luining contained a plant-based sausage bit, a ... [+]
During the tasting, we trialed fully plant-based sausages to compare them to the sample with the cultivated pork fat. As de Nood told us, we shouldn’t be surprised it tastes like pork, which it really did.
“It’s animalistic specificity,” says Luining to my suprise, as we did the tastings together. “There's the reason why you can taste the difference between pigs and cows. For pigs, most of its taste comes from the fat fraction”.
The pork meat taste remained quite strongly in the mouth after having sampled it, but it did not feel unpleasent or artificial. What made the product sounds realistic was that, despite pork fat being just one third of the total product, the flavour of other ingredients could not be identified.
Luining do not hide the fact that the impossibility to taste cultured meat delayed their product development phase - and the ones of other companies - which in the last year could only be carried in Singapore.
Although he admits that 'cultivated meat won't show up massively on the radar in the next decade and consumers acceptance could be built up slowly through tastings: “This will be a gradual process (...) people will understand that this is just another option in the supermarket." he said.
Expansion
Like many European novel food companies, Meatable is planning to launch in Singapore, where the approval process is quicker and more efficient. The company submitted already its dossier and Luining said that ‘any time soon’ they could receive an answer from the Singapore Food Agency.
So far, only poultry-based cultivated meat products are accessible to consumers both in Singapore and in the U.S.. The latest addition to the realm of on-the-market products in Singapore is a quail-based cultivated meat product from the Australian company Vow.
When the U.S. approved the Inflation Reduction Act which facilitates biotech companies, European firms started looking at this new market, complaining about the limited support received in the EU. But Luining said this is just a fraction of the issue: “(The U.S.) It's a very big single market. It's one of the biggest meat consuming markets in the world. And there's very good infrastructure there.” says Luining.
That is the predominant reason why Meatable will try to enter the American market, before looking into other regions from 2026: “We didn't abandon Europe, we just need to make sure that we have enough traction to convince people to help us with the next phase,” Luining said.
Climate debate
Aside from achieving a greater degree of animal welfare as no animals are killed to produce it, cultivated meat has been associated to increased emission reductions.
According to the life cycle assessments (LCAs) conducted by researchers of the Dutch University of Delf, cultivated meat can offer environmental gains compared to conventional meat as it is less resource-intensive.
Cultivated pork meat production, together with poultry still have a lower emission reduction compared to how much cultivated beef could cut greenhouse gas emissions.
However, Luining mentioned that studies conducted so far on LCAs do not assess their production method: “Nobody has modeled our pluripotent cells method. Since everybody's still using primary muscle cells, and primary fat cells, that has been the method analysed.” he said.
As their production process cuts production time down by half, their methodology could potentially save up more energy and feedstock for the cells: “That’s why speed is so important,” he said.
Many stakeholders including NGOs and govenrment representatives in European countries remain skeptics about the cultivated meat's environmental claims, technologies, business models and finally, the products.
“Of course new ideas are not always immediately accepted in society. But what I do see in societies is that good ideas usually surface because they provide benefits,” Luining concluded.
