How Cultivated Meat Went From the Lab to the Plate

In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown hamburger was served in London. Made from cattle cells, it cost around €250,000 at the time and was more a proof of concept than a lunch. The idea seemed almost like science fiction: producing real meat without raising and slaughtering an entire animal. A little more than a decade later, one of the companies at the forefront of efforts to turn that idea into a commercial product is Israel’s Aleph Farms, which is attempting something particularly complex: not a burger or a nugget, but a cut of beef resembling a steak.

The Israeli story began at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering had spent years working in tissue engineering: studying how to make cells grow and organize themselves into three-dimensional tissue, for example to repair muscle or create blood vessels. In 2016, she began conducting experiments growing cattle cells on a plant-based protein scaffold. A year later, The Kitchen, the food-tech incubator of the Strauss Group, entrepreneur Didier Toubia and Dr. Neta Lavon joined the research. From that meeting of tissue engineering and food technology, Aleph Farms was born. Levenberg is a co-founder and the company’s chief scientific adviser, while Toubia serves as CEO.