The USDA’s first and only inspection grant is complete for a large-scale cultivated meat factory in North Carolina, that’s ready to open.
Along with a USDA blessing for the company’s product label, Believer Meats now has all the approvals it needs to produce and sell its cell-cultured product in the USA. It comes after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in July signed off on Believer Meats with a “no questions” letter.
It is the fifth cultivated meat startup to get a “no questions” letter from the FDA and the first non-US company to be greenlit.
Believer Meats was founded in 2018 by Yaakov Nahmias, a biomedical engineering professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Israeli startup is the world’s largest cultivated meat factory, to which USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service personnel are being assigned.
Construction of the Wilson County, North Carolina, factory was completed earlier this year. On LinkedIn, company CEO Gustavo Burger called it “a major milestone that authorizes us to begin commercial production and sales of our cultivated chicken products in the U.S. and export to international markets.”
Formerly known as Future Meat Technologies, Believer Meats attracted $123 million in venture capital. It’s a 200,000-square-foot factory that features an innovation centre and tasting kitchen, and will be able to churn out 12,000 tonnes of cultivated chicken every year. A tonne is about 2,200 pounds.
Believer Meats will use centrifuge-based perfusion and a cell media rejuvenation process to produce its cultivated chicken.
Spontaneously immortalized fibroblast cells derived from fertilized domestic chicken eggs are used in production.
Burger said Believer Meats is the “first and only large-scale cultivated meat facility to have earned this approval,” which is the final word from U.S. regulatory authorities.
While several states are banning cell-cultured meat products, North Carolina is not among them. NCBiotech, the state’s economic development center for biotechnology, is giving Believer Meats a warm embrace.
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