Is SA ready to embrace a culture of lab-grown meat?

Two years is a long time to wait for a beef burger. But, for the founders of Mzanzi Meat Co, a local cultivated meat company based in Cape Town, the wait was worth the while when they cooked their first cultivated beef patty at an unveiling event on Tuesday.

Mzanzi Meat Co was started by Brett Thompson and Tasneem Karodia in March 2020 as a way to reimagine the way we look at food without having to go plant-based.  

Thompson has been working in alternative proteins for close to 15 years and spent time living and working abroad before returning to SA and co-founding Mzanzi Meat Co with Karodia.

“I came back to SA and saw no one was doing cultivated meat on the continent. I know after spending some time in [places like] San Francisco, Berlin and New York that this was an exciting start-up industry that was only about eight years old and had the potential to drastically reimagine the way we look at food,” Thompson says.

The vision to start cultivating meat in SA was motivated by the realisation that South Africans love meat.

“After years of telling South Africans to eat less meat and eat more plant-based I’ve realised South Africans love braais,” Thompson says.

“If we can make food that can belong at a braai, a potjie, a shisanyama, Sunday roasts — all those things that we hold dearest as a country — I think that’s your best way of getting impact and helping with the goal of reducing the suffering of as many animals as possible.”

Cultivating meat in a lab is not just less cruel towards animals, it’s also a way to tackle food security while benefiting the environment by reducing land and water use and it produces food that isn’t grown with potentially harmful hormones or antibiotics.

HOW IT’S BEING DONE

“Ultimately what we trying to do is replicate the process of what happens in an animal’s body outside an animal’s body,” explains Thompson.

The team works with a farm and animal sanctuary in the Western Cape where they take biopsies of muscle and fat from free-roaming animals in a procedure that takes 15 minutes and is minimally invasive for the animal.

This tissue sample is then taken to the Mzanzi Meat Co lab in Woodstock where it is grown in a culture medium in conditions that mimic the animal’s body in order for the cells to start developing and dividing.

Karodia, who is also the company’s CFO, says they’re working on plans to scale up their operations and move into a pilot production facility.

The team hope to roll out their first products into restaurants by the end of the year and once they’ve received the necessary go-ahead from the government and industry regulators they plan to roll out their cultivated meat products in retail outlets within a couple of years.

Initially Thompson says customers can expect to pay the same price they would for a Beyond Meat burger but they hope to ultimately reduce their costs to achieve price parity on selected meat products as they increase the scale of production.

THE WAY FORWARD

Mzanzi Meat Co was the first local company to start developing cultivated meat using cellular agriculture but the industry has grown in the past two years.

“When we started there wasn’t anyone [doing what we were doing]. A few companies have come into existence and are working in cellular agriculture broadly and I can see other parts of Africa come online soon,” says Thompson, adding that their initial focus is on SA but that they see the potential to move into Africa as well. “Our tagline actually is ‘Making Meat for Africa’ so it’s on our agenda.”

“Next up we’re developing sausages to go with the burger and our goal is to produce meat that can be used in traditional African cuisine. Everything we make will be braai-friendly and ready for the fire,” says Karodia.  

They are already cultivating other animals such as chicken, pigs and lamb and hope to eventually be able to showcase indigenous SA animals to the rest of the world.

“I’m excited about the potential for biotech firms in SA and the industry is going to start growing incredibly around the world and here [at home]. I look forward in seeing the future,” Thompson says.

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