On the top floor of a modern high-rise building in Rehovot, a town 30 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, Didier Toubia, head of Aleph Farms, showed visitors the product he's so proud of. It might look like a thin slice of vacuum-packed beef, yet it isn't actually meat but a food product derived from cell culture.
Like many Israeli start-ups, Aleph Farms is the result of the research conducted at Technion, a world-renowned technology institute that constitutes a real city within the city of Haifa.
In one of its many laboratories, employees are still hard at work perfecting this food of the future, including by making thicker slices using 3D printing technology. As a sign of Technion's keen interest in food, an innovation center dedicated to food tech is scheduled to open there in 2025.
Environmental imperatives
Aleph Farms intends to go into production as soon as possible without waiting for further research breakthroughs. At its Rehovot office, it already features a demonstrator to fine-tune its production processes and is planning to open factories in Israel and Singapore by 2025, which should enable it to produce tens of tonnes of this foodstuff per year even though it is still waiting for the green light from international health authorities.
Toubia − whom we met during a tour of Israel's technological ecosystem (organized by the agency Raoul) for French journalists − does not doubt that the solution developed by his company will ultimately prevail because of environmental imperatives. According to him, his "meat" − the company carefully avoids using the word − will generate 78% less carbon dioxide emissions and reduce dependence on foreign production for countries where animal husbandry is underdeveloped, like Israel, which imports 90% of its beef.
The company is already interested in new areas like collagens for food and cosmetics. Yet it also knows it will have to be patient for its unusual product to gain a foothold: "It took Tesla 15 years to reach a 10% market share," said Toubia, who hopes to bring about the same revolution.
In a report produced earlier this year, the Start-Up National Center, an organization at the core of Israel's tech ecosystem, listed 637 start-ups dedicated to agriculture and food, the vast majority of which (90%) are less than five years old. "There's definitely a boom," said Alon Turkaspa, the organization's specialist on these issues. Some of these companies are looking for alternative protein sources, while others want to create new food categories or are interested in packaging. Another, AKA Foods, is developing artificial intelligence to speed up the production of plant-based products that mimic the taste and consistency of meat products.
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