Today (Tuesday), Redefine Meat, an Israeli foodtech startup developing alternative meat, announced a $29 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Happiness Capital and Hanaco Ventures, with participation from Sake Bosch, Losa Group, CPT Capital, and K3 Venture. To date, the company has raised $35 million.
Not just ground “beef”
With animal cruelty awareness growing, it’s become pretty obvious that the meat industry needs to go through change. This notion has led many companies to rise with alternative meat solutions. There are those who develop cultured meat (like Future Meat and Aleph Farms), and then there are the market giants like Impossible Foods, which develop plant-based alt-meats. The main cog in the alt-meat machine is that most of these companies focus on recreating animal-conscious ground beef, which is cool and everything - but surely it won’t satisfy the carnivore crowd. Redefine Meat claim that not only can they create hamburgers and ground beef, but actual steaks as well with varying levels of fat and marbling - just like the real thing.
"This funding, which was concluded faster than we could have imagined a year ago, is a major step towards becoming the world's biggest alternative meat company by 2030,” said CEO and Co-Founder Eshchar Ben-Shitrit.
As we previously reported in January, the company performed a blind taste test, and 90% of the 600 tasters couldn’t tell that it was alt-meat. As a result of the test, the company partnered with a major meat distributor in Israel.
Redefine Meat developed plant-based 3D printing technology, and claim that it can recreate the exact taste and texture of real meat. The company noted that the funding will help enhance its product offering, establish production at scale, and help support its commercial launch and international growth in 2021. The company was founded in 2018 and employs a team of 40 people.
Ben-Shitrit added: "We want to change the belief that delicious meat can only come from animals, and we have all the building blocks in place to make this a reality: high-quality meat products, strategic partnerships with stakeholders across the world, a large-scale pilot line under construction, and the first-ever industrial 3D Alt-Meat printers set to be deployed within meat distributors later this year."
