EIC Coffee Break with PROFUSE: advancing solutions addressing the need for traditional meat alternatives

Every month, during a Coffee Break, we dive into the stories of EIC innovators and get a glimpse of the people behind EIC projects. Today’s guest is Guy Nevo Michrowski, who co-founded ProFuse Technology together with Doctor Tamar Eigler-Hirsh, in the search for a technology that could provide vegans, as himself, with a good meat replacement. Tune in to discover more about this forward-looking field, the challenges posed by standard meat and the recent advancement in the cultivated meat technology of PROFUSE, an EIC Transition project coordinated by ProFuse Technology.

For starters, can you tell us more about you and the mission of your company? 

My name is Guy Nevo Michrowski and, together with my partner, Doctor Tamar Eigler-Hirsh, we co-founded ProFuse Technology. I started out in the early days as a chef in a restaurant, but my profession quickly shifted into technology. While I was looking for my new project to combine my love for food, cooking and technology, I ended up in the food tech space. 

Eventually, I was introduced to the Technology Transfer Office of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel where I met Tamar, who was just finishing her postdoc with an exciting innovation. As the Weizmann Institute was looking to license our technology, with Tamar we decided that together we would license the technology to start a company.   

Also – if I may add – 13 years ago I turned vegan so I was looking for an innovation in food tech that would make me, as a meat lover, have some kind of a good meat replacement. Indeed, our mission at ProFuse Technology is providing cultivated meat producers with innovative solutions that can optimise the muscle cultivation process (i.e. the meat production process). 

With our solution, we help make the process faster, cheaper, with higher protein content, better flavour, and better texture. And that’s a big challenge. 

What motivated you to apply to the EIC Transition Grant and how is it helping you in the development of your technology? 

The challenge for a lot of new technologies is that they would require a long evolution process until they achieve profitability. For a company like ours, it's a long process and an expensive one, as we need not only to rely on investors’ funds, but also on government grants to be able to develop our innovative solutions. 

The EIC Transition grant that we won is helping us to achieve a lot of goals which would have been unattainable without it. For example, all in all, we have invested – thanks to the EIC grant – around $1 million just in the regulation work because we need to test our products and prove that they are safe. Another example is an expensive piece of equipment, which the grant is helping us to purchase. Otherwise, I think we would still use service providers, which means we would have been much slower in the development process.  

The EIC Transition grant is helping us in a critical step of scaling up our technology from a lab environment to the industrialised environment and is also supporting our efforts in working together with customers to make sure that our technology is scaled up to suit their needs.

By 2050, meat demand is expected to double yet consumption must decrease by 50% to mitigate greenhouse gases and conserve land. Must also be noticed that the plant-based meat market size will grow only of 19.4% by 2030. In your personal view, how can accessibility to cultivated meat be increased to meet this demand in the future and which are the steps ProFuse is taking in this direction? 

The answer is we can't. We simply can't. The way meat is produced is extremely inefficient in terms of resources: it utilises a lot of fresh water and feeding animals consumes 70% of our agricultural land.  

So, what we must do is find alternative methods for producing proteins. Plant-based proteins is one area of technology that is being looked at, where you get proteins coming from soy, beans or peas. But that would not be enough. And this is the real need for cultivated meat: to simply secure enough supply of it.  

The cultivated meat production method is by far more efficient in the use of water and in the use of land. There's still data missing on how much electricity cultivated meat will use, but I believe that, eventually, it will be extremely efficient. And that’s what cultivated meat is supposed to do to solve this challenge, both on an environmental and on a food security level. 

Given your expertise in the field, which advice would you give to people who are playing with the idea of starting a company or research project in the field of muscle cultivation?  

I think right now the cultivated meat industry is at an extremely challenging point. There was a big hype around investments and technological solutions in the cultivated meat spectrum in the years 2021 and 2022, but this hype is now over, and a lot of the cultivated meat companies are facing a huge financial challenge also because their business is really capital-intensive. As we are not a cultivated meat company, we are not as capital-intensive. 

My advice is: start from scratch, build your own technology. Do not try to adapt stem cell therapy technology to fit food production. Rather start from scratch with a technology that – from day one – is optimised to high volume / low margin industry such as the food industry. Luckily, this is what we've done! I'm happy to see that there are new companies emerging in this field – what I like to call, Generation Two companies. It’s very exciting! And we are there to support them.

Over the last months your research labs hosted 60 high school students from the Meir Shfeya Youth Village and Agricultural Boarding School. Why do you think it is important to introduce this field to the next generations? 

Our approach is that the only way we can tackle this huge challenge of bringing cultivated meat to everybody is by having a community working together where each brings their own strength and capabilities. In this sense, our approach is that of being very open, sharing data, and collaborating. There's so much to do that I don't see anyone in this industry as my competitor. We are all trying to push forward to achieve the same goal!

This approach is also relevant when looking at the community around us. We've been working with the Meir Shfeya Agricultural Boarding School which helped us get access to some samples that we needed to take in order to develop our technology, for example getting eggs for the extraction of cells.

As part of the collaboration, we are also supporting them and the purpose of the tour around our labs and around other food technology companies residing near us was to expand the students’ horizons, to show them that agriculture and food production are not only about working in the farm.  

You recently announced that your company’s flagship PF-B8 cell line is now adapted to grow in serum-free conditions. Could you expand on the significance of this achievement? 

One of the goals of PROFUSE – the EIC-funded project coordinated by us – was to get our PF-B8 cell line to be adapted to a serum-free environment. Why is this achievement so important? 

Serum is actually one of the materials that is found in the blood that supports the cells’ growth proliferation. The problem is that serum is produced from animals. That's why it is very important to retrieve the cells and slowly get them used to an environment which does not include serum, so that they can then adapt.  

The cell line is the basis for a cultivated meat company to design an industrial process that will be replicable in different factories around the world as – unlike cells taken from animals – a cell line basically consists of cells that will proliferate. In this way, the cultivated meat industry could scale up without being dependent on animals. 

© Profuse Technology 

And, lastly, a more personal question. While sustainable meat alternatives are growing in popularity, consumer acceptance of cultivated meat remains one of the major challenges. What would you tell these consumers in order to change these perceptions? 

One of our investors is a big food company and its CEO once told me one sentence I will never forget, that is, “You can never fool the consumers’ mouth”. In other words, if something is not right or good, nobody will bite.  
For plant-based meat, I think the consumers are disappointed because, firstly, the products are not good enough yet and secondly, the positioning of the products as meat alternatives created expectations which could not be met. 

However, I do believe that once we will have the first cultivated meat products out there, – it won't be before five years – once they will be competitive in price and once there will be a supply shortage of standard meat as I expect (or alternatively, prices will skyrocket) cultivated meat will be an alternative that consumers will consider.  

The first products will maybe just be ground meat to use in your lasagna or bolognese. But in the future, we will be able to start designing a new line of products which may even be better. But it will be a long time before we achieve that, so I think this is a huge challenge.  

About ProFuse Technology 

ProFuse Technology, co-founded by Guy Nevo Michrowski and Doctor Tamar Eigler-Hirsh, has been dedicated to developing products for muscle tissue growth for the cultivated meat and the life sciences sectors. Supported by the EIC Transition grant and based on six years of research, ProFuse Technology is pioneering the scaling up of cultivated meat production processes through its groundbreaking cell line.  

Learn more about ProFuse Technology by visiting the Horizon Europe database and the company official website.