U.S. cultivated meat producer Clever Carnivore recently hosted tastings of its products in two Californian cities — Palo Alto and San Francisco.
These are the first tastings the Chicago-based company has held on the West Coast. The rooms were reportedly packed with investors, chefs, and industry operators, who got to sample Clever Carnivore’s cultivated bratwurst. According to a LinkedIn post, guests were impressed by the taste of the products and the company’s scalable, modular production process.
“Had the absolute pleasure of tasting Clever Carnivore’s cultivated meat sausages in San Francisco earlier this week,” said Irfan Tahir, a scientist at Prolific Machines who attended the event. “I may have gone back for seconds (okay, I definitely did). Thank you [Clever Carnivore CEO] Virginia Rangos for hosting and for the deep and honest conversations. Your commitment to shaping the future of food shines through!”
Crucial scientific advancements
Clever Carnivore previously secured $7 million in seed funding in 2023 to expand and scale its operations. As reported by AgFunderNews, the company is now raising further capital to fund a demo-scale plant with a 40,000-liter capacity.
In June, Clever Carnivore announced that it had made three crucial scientific advancements — low-cost, limited-ingredient cell culture media, high-performance pork cells that grow efficiently and are produced without genetic modification, and a factory design that minimizes costs and maximizes bioprocess robustness.
The company’s cell culture media costs $0.07 per liter to produce at the current pilot scale, with further reductions expected at full plant scale. Meanwhile, its cell lines are said to be capable of less than 14-hour doubling times in adherent culture, pushing the limits of what was previously believed possible. However, Clever Carnivore’s products currently only contain 10% cultivated cells; the remainder is plant-based meat.
“With ultra-high-growth cells and negligible-cost media, we’re showing that cultivated meat can be made at scale and produced profitably,” said Clever Carnivore on LinkedIn.
