Find Fake Meat Flavorless? Cultivated Animal Fat is Here To Make Plant-Based Burgers Taste Like the Real Thing

What makes meat tasty? What chemical factor causes some people to salivate at the sight of crispy bacon and seared steak? Max Jamilly thinks he has the answer: fat.

Few would quibble with the entrepreneur’s assertion. The human tongue is practically programmed to warmly receive dietary fat; when its taste buds recognize fat’s long-chain fatty acids, it’s thought the brain releases neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, such as beta-endorphin and dopamine, stimulating a positive sensory experience.

And as fat can absorb flavor compounds – such as the furanthiols and thiazoles that help create a meaty aroma – these endorphins can be intensified with the heady rush of favored tastes, metered out and compounded with each chew.

For meat eaters, this chemical-neural combination is often a delicious experience. For plant-based meat eaters? Not so much.

“When we see people not buying meat alternatives or failing to repeat purchase after they buy it the first time, it’s not because they don't think it’s sustainable; it’s because it just doesn’t taste good enough,” says Jamilly. “That's what’s really at the front of people's minds.”

According to Jamilly, without any unique animal fats to complement their flavor, plant-based meat substitutes can never truly rival their genuine counterparts, either in sales or savoriness. His solution? If you can’t beat them, replicate their fat.

Trim the fat, then put it in a bioreactor

“Without fat, it’s impossible to recreate the experience of eating traditional meat, which is what people crave in particular – it’s what flexitarians crave,” Jamilly tells Technology Networks. “And if we’re going to ease this transition from traditional meat – which is killing us and killing the planet – to meat alternatives, then we need to make meat alternatives taste great. And the only way that we can make them taste great is if we have that missing, all-important ingredient, which is fat.”

To achieve his pinguid vision, Jamilly co-founded Hoxton Farms in 2020. The London-based start-up helped pioneer animal fat “cultivation”, which, in practice, involves growing actual animal fat cells in bioreactors.

“It starts with a handful of stem cells that we borrow from an animal like a cow or a pig,” Jamilly explains. “The cells are the natural precursors to fat, so if we left them in the pig, they would have turned into fat anyway. All that we do is bring them into our facility, put them in a cultivator, and convince them that they’re still inside a pig, so they develop into the same kind of fat.”

Max Jamilly, co-founder of Hoxton Farms. Credit: Hoxton Farms.

“The cultivator is a bioreactor, a fermenter like [one used in] the brewing industry. Inside the cultivator, we feed the cells a mixture of sugars and salts and proteins, which all come sustainably from plants. Basically, we’re feeding them what pigs eat; we’ve just digested it a bit, like the pig would normally do.”

The whole process takes two-three weeks – a considerably shorter turnaround time than one would find in swine agriculture – and once the fat is extracted, it’s quickly shipped off to plant-based meat substitute manufacturers to bolster their products.

“We sell our cultivated fat business-to-business as an ingredient,” Jamilly says. “The [meat alternative producers] mix it with their protein to make products that, powered by the fat, look and cook and taste as good as the real thing, maybe even better and healthier.”

These fatty, plant-based quasi-meats are unlikely to appeal to dedicated vegetarians and vegans, who wouldn’t eat a morsel of animal-derived tissue, vat-brewed or not, but they could tempt traditional carnivores away from their burgers and meatballs. At least, that’s what many in the plant-based meat sector are counting on.

Plant-based peril

Fueled by environmental and animal welfare concerns, plant-based “meat” products experienced a boom of consumer interest not too long ago. Between 2018 and 2021, total sales of plant-based foods in the US grew from $4.8 billion to $7.4 billion. The future of fake flesh looked lucrative.

But since these heady heights, it appears many customers have lost their appetite for soy-bacon and bean burgers.

According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat and seafood dollar sales declined 12% in the US in 2023. Some of this drop-off can be attributed to broader consumer spending declines due to inflation, but the plant-based market has still experienced greater damage than others; conventional meat and seafood unit sales only declined 2% during 2023.

To bring back the good ol’ days of 2021, meat analogs might just need the kind of juicy animal fat Jamilly and his colleagues are growing at Hoxton.

But what about the health risks associated with such fats? some might cry. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends people moderate their red meat intake to reduce their risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Should people not be limiting their intake of vat-brewed animal fat, too?

Perhaps. But animal fats aren’t the only lipids with quiet health risks, and the ones currently found in many plant-based products may just be unhealthier than Hoxton’s produce, according to Jamilly.

“The fat we’re replacing in most applications is coconut oil, which is higher in saturated fat content than pork fat. Therefore, our cultivated pork fat is likely to result in products that are better for cardiovascular health than their current plant-based alternatives.”

The level of control Hoxton has over its fats could also lead it to produce modified, healthier versions in the future, says Jamilly.

“We can control the composition of the cultivated fat if desired for specific use cases. This means we can reduce the levels of unhealthy saturated fats and increase healthier fats, like unsaturated fats, or incorporate beneficial compounds, such as omega-3 fatty acids. This way we can enhance the nutritional value of our cultivated fat.”

Fat, sustained

So, the fats may not be vegan-vogue, but they do hit another trend: sustainability.  

“What we make is much more sustainable than intensive animal agriculture,” Jamilly says. “We have very clear emissions models that let us understand the whole supply chain, from biopsy to bacon. Our environmental impact is up to 10 times less in terms of carbon emissions than making the same amount of meat in an animal.”

Hoxton Farms' scientists, working in the lab. Image credit: Hoxton Farms.

“This process,” he adds, “is much easier to control, produces less carbon, uses less fresh water, less antibiotics, less habitable land and overall is a much more sustainable way for us to meet the rising demand for protein and food more broadly, as food security becomes a much bigger issue as agriculture becomes harder still as the climate changes.”

“The reality is that being able to do all of this in a room rather than on half of the deforested Amazon is a much more efficient and intensive process. It really is the future for making food in a clean way.”

Bolstered by these green credentials and its products’ superior flavor – “delicious”, Jamilly attests – Hoxton Farms may just be about to inject the plant-based food market with much-needed vim. But it’s not the only one trying to do so.

Over in San Francisco, Mission Barns is developing its own vat-grown pork fat to incorporate into plant-based bacon, meatballs and sausages. Other fatty start-ups have stuck to the core botanical ethos of plant-based foods. Lypid (another San Fran company) uses microencapsulation technology to produce solid fats from plant oils and water. Barcelona-based Cubiq Foods has adopted both methods to develop a “full range of alternative fat solutions.”

But if Jamilly is nervous about the competition, he doesn’t show it. Hoxton Farms, he says, is out to cultivate as much fat as it can.

“We’re barely four years old, and we’ve gone from milligrams to kilograms of production in that time, and we will become the world's largest supplier of cultivated fat as an ingredient for all food applications, whether it’s meat alternatives, soups, sauces, other applications besides, it’ll be ingredients like cultivated fat made from real animal cells, just in a much cleaner way, that make those foods taste delicious and perform exactly the way they should and be really healthy for consumers.”

“That’s what will enable this broader shift in our food system from relying on this outdated, intensive factory farming instead to new, clean, really efficient cultivated cuisine,” he adds. “That’s how we will eat in the future. Within all of that, Hoxton Farms will move from making pork fat alone to chicken, beef, fish and a bunch of other things. All over the world, we’ll be making more cultivated fat than anybody else. So it’s going to be an exciting, albeit busy, few years.”