Rise of Food Tech Companies

On March 22nd, The Information hosted a Video Summit on the rise of food technology companies and the future of food with the CEOs of Eat Just and Memphis Meats in partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Singapore Tourism Board.

“The future of food will require us to cultivate this very integrated ecosystem that has innovation on one hand with a forward thinking regulatory environment based on science,” said Dr. Tan Lee Kim, director-general and deputy CEO of Singapore Food Agency.

It is still early days for the industry in terms of regulation. In December, Singapore Food Agency granted San Francisco-based Eat Just the world’s first regulatory approval to serve lab-grown meat, also known as cultured meat, to customers.

“This is not for the faint of heart … We're building a technology platform that, today, one country has approved: Singapore,” said JoshTetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, which sells a plant-based egg substitute and cultured chicken. “This is a hundreds of millions of dollar capital investment on to a billion.”

The nascent but fast-growing field of cultured meats and the more established industry around meat substitutes aim to create scalable, sustainable food sources that do less harm to the environment.

“It's the intense desire of moving away to a more sustainable and a more kinder, more scalable way of eating food, and that my choice matters when I go and buy a product, whether it's in retail, or restaurant, that the choice I'm making, what I'm paying for, matters,” said Uma Valeti, co-founder and CEO of Memphis Meats, a developer of cultured meat.