homehome Home chatchat Notifications


Cultivated bacon could soon be a reality, as a company readies its first tasing

Two restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area will offer dishes with lab-grown bacon.

Fermin Koop
August 4, 2020 @ 7:01 pm

share Share

The cultivated meat maker Mission Barns is now offering consumers a chance to try its brand-new bacon grown from real pork fat cells, produced without animal slaughter. A group between 50 and 100 individuals will be selected for a weeklong tasting in mid-August to be carried out in selected restaurants.

Proteins cultivated in this way aren’t available on the market anywhere yet, so this is an opportunity to find what meat grown from just a few cells tastes like.

Image credits: Cookbookman17 (CC BY 2.0)

Restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area will prepare dishes using Mission Barns bacon, one being Cockscomb in San Francisco and the other an Oakland-based restaurant yet to be named. Cockscomb is owned by Chef Chris Cosentino, who won Bravo’s Top Chef Masters in 2012.

The dishes will be prepared by Mission Barns director of product development, Chef Michael Wallace. The restaurants will serve them at no cost for the tastes. They will have to sign a waiver as the product isn’t approved for commercial sale yet, as well as provide feedback to the company. However, the food won’t be served inside due to the current coronavirus pandemic.

“We definitely are looking for a diverse set of folks in terms of palates and backgrounds,” Eitan Fischer, CEO and Co-Founder of Mission Barns, told Forbes. This means high-end chefs but also “everyday people who really know and really like bacon,” she added.

The company hopes that its cultivated bacon can measure up to the real thing. Mission’s bacon is manufactured with pork fat and a mix of plant-based ingredients for texture. It’s grown from cells instead of processing parts of a butchered animal, as Fischer describes it.

The pork cells are fed with a mix of nutrients and sugar to grow and fatten up until you essentially have a slice of bacon. While the process can be expensive for most cuts of meats, it’s much cheaper for fat cells. And since bacon is mostly pork fat, Mission Barns can move forward with its products.

“Our process begins by isolating cells from an animal and placing them in a warm cultivator which mimics the animal’s body. The cells grow naturally as they do in a cow, chicken, or pig as we feed them nutrients including vitamins, sugars, and proteins. After the cells fatten the cultivation process is complete. We then harvest the meat, throw it on a pan, and enjoy,” the company describes.

Nevertheless, there’s still a long way to go. The company has already reached the scale of production to supply to a small number of restaurants but it doesn’t expect to sell its bacon this year. Alongside Missions Barns, there are other 36 companies around the world working to make cultured proteins a reality.

Different companies are now working on different products. BlueNalu is working on seafood, while East Just and chicken giant KFC are working on chicken nuggets. These efforts and the upcoming tasting by Mission Barns could mean commercialization of cultured proteins might soon be a reality.

share Share

Researchers Turn 'Moon Dust' Into Solar Panels That Could Power Future Space Cities

"Moonglass" could one day keep the lights on.

Ford Pinto used to be the classic example of a dangerous car. The Cybertruck is worse

Is the Cybertruck bound to be worse than the infamous Pinto?

Archaeologists Find Neanderthal Stone Tool Technology in China

A surprising cache of stone tools unearthed in China closely resembles Neanderthal tech from Ice Age Europe.

A Software Engineer Created a PDF Bigger Than the Universe and Yes It's Real

Forget country-sized PDFs — someone just made one bigger than the universe.

The World's Tiniest Pacemaker is Smaller Than a Grain of Rice. It's Injected with a Syringe and Works using Light

This new pacemaker is so small doctors could inject it directly into your heart.

Scientists Just Made Cement 17x Tougher — By Looking at Seashells

Cement is a carbon monster — but scientists are taking a cue from seashells to make it tougher, safer, and greener.

Three Secret Russian Satellites Moved Strangely in Orbit and Then Dropped an Unidentified Object

We may be witnessing a glimpse into space warfare.

Researchers Say They’ve Solved One of the Most Annoying Flaws in AI Art

A new method that could finally fix the bizarre distortions in AI-generated images when they're anything but square.

The small town in Germany where both the car and the bicycle were invented

In the quiet German town of Mannheim, two radical inventions—the bicycle and the automobile—took their first wobbly rides and forever changed how the world moves.

Scientists Created a Chymeric Mouse Using Billion-Year-Old Genes That Predate Animals

A mouse was born using prehistoric genes and the results could transform regenerative medicine.