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Aleph Farms is bringing cultivated steak to Brazil

This month, cell-based meat producer Aleph Farms partnered with Brazilian-based BRF S.A. in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreement that will bring cultivated meat to the Brazilian market. Under the agreement, the two companies will co-develop a cultivated meat product using Aleph’s BioFram technology platform, and BRF will distribute the products In Brazil.

“As one of the largest beef producers in the world, Brazil is a strategic market for us,” Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms said in a statement. “This new partnership advances Aleph Farms’ strategy to integrate into the existing ecosystem as part of our go-to-market plans.”

Aleph Farms is quickly scaling up its go-to-market strategy. In January, the cell-based meat company said that it was going to bring its technology to Japan through a partnership with Mitsubishi, but through these partnerships, the company is looking to create something more than a cell-based meat product that vaguely resembles meat. Instead, Aleph is looking to create meat analogues that can stand on their own; in February the company announced that it had successfully printed the first ribeye steak.

While its new partnership with BRF, which was unveiled in December 2020, is expected to generate $18.5 billion by 2030, this pair still needs to contend with the reality that price parity with animal protein and governmental approval for commercial sale continue to remain barriers to the widespread adoption of cultivated meat. However, BRF has expressed confidence that consumer demand will change that.

“Since 2014, we have witnessed an increasing global demand for new sources of protein driven by several factors, namely environmental concerns, new diets and lifestyles, which has spurred the growth of new dietary genres including flexitarianism, vegetarianism and more,” said Lorival Luz, chief executive officer of BRF in a statement.

With Brazil recently reaffirming the UN (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - UNFCCC) and committing to reducing total net greenhouse gas emissions by 43% in 2030, this hope might soon become a reality. Livestock accounts for a significant proportion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and with the Untited Nations predicting the global population to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, cell-based meat presents a solution to help incorporate innovation into the local agricultural ecosystem and allow companies and countries reach their climate goals.