Scientists Develop World’s First Lab-Grown Tenderloin Steak You Can Cut Into

With Chick-Fil-A launching its first plant-based burger, and researchers developing a vegan whole-cut salmon that looks, tastes, and flakes just like the real thing, meat alternatives have quickly become commonplace in our daily lives.

In a similar vein, Swiss startup Mirai Foods has recently announced a world-first innovation for the industry, having successfully created lab-grown tenderloin steak using a technique that cultivates muscle tissue to realistically mimic conventional meat.

As Interesting Engineering pointed out, this isn’t the first time meat has been produced under laboratory conditions. Despite this, the fillet steak has long been considered a significant challenge to recreate, as it comprises a complex structure of different cell types.

Hence the excitement surrounding the company’s cultivated steak, which was developed by scientists using patent-pending ‘Fibration Technology’, which combines long, mature muscle fibers with enzymes and cultivated fat tissue.

The mixture is then placed into the firm’s in-house bioreactor—dubbed ‘The Rocket’—where it spends five days before “a tenderloin centerpiece is complete, from which steaks of almost any thickness can be cut.”

At the moment, Mirai Foods is one of the few cultivated meat companies in the world that produces its alternative meats without genetic engineering, which is heavily restricted in the European Union.

As such, the company claims its alternative delivers the same taste, quality, and health as an actual cow, while still adhering to the current preferences of European customers. It's part of a group seeking to lean into whole-cut meat alternatives instead of just minced versions.

“Other types of meat can already be produced in the lab. A fillet steak is the ultimate challenge: it consists of different cell types, which—if combined correctly—result in a complex meat structure,” said Mirai Foods CEO Christoph Mayr.

“This structuring process is technologically challenging, making steaks extremely difficult to produce. That’s why Mirai Foods is taking an important step towards sustainable meat with the first cultivated beef tenderloin steak,” he added.

With whole-cut fillets of fish, beef, and even pork already achieved by scientists, what other innovative selection of alternative meat will we get next? It’s anyone’s guess.

[via Interesting Engineering and Green Queen, images © MIRAI]