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OUR technology
Blending Nature and Technology
In our quest to create better and more sustainable meat, we have developed a plethora of technologies to precisely control the appearance, flavour and texture of cell and plant-based ingredients to make products that give you the complete meat eating experience!
Appearance control
SMILE - Scalable Micro-Imprinting Lapis Extension
“Scalable Micro-Imprinting Lapis Extension” SMILE technology adapts well-established microimprinting methods from the precision engineering industry to introduce microscale grooves into alternative protein sheets that are formulated to retain the microimprinted patterns and generate microfibrous structures upon cooking and tearing. The imprinted sheets are then stacked and bound with food-grade binders to produce macroscale plant-based SMILE precision meat cuts.
As the SMILE process replicates the fibrous features of whole-cut meat at only the relevant length scales that the consumer can appreciate, and not the nanoscale alignment of protein molecules achieved by the industry gold-standard, SMILE achieves a more than ten-fold reduction in the energy required for protein texturization.
Stamp-tearing guided by microimprinting
Engineering structural precision in nature v.s. industry
SMILE technology is compatible with the addition of fat replacers in between or within imprinted protein sheets to allow the modular production of marbled meat cuts, which overcomes a key barrier faced by the industry-standard technology for producing meat cut alternatives.
To ensure industrial scalability of the SMILE process, we are building a prototype machine with the ultimate goal of providing a fully automated, turn-key machine that is easy to operate and convenient to deploy in any factory in the world.
Cell Essence®
The cost of cell cultivation is a major barrier to the commercial feasibility of cultivated meat, but we believe that animal cells are ultimately required to recapitulate the authenticity and complexity of meat flavour.
Cell Essence was inspired by how the well-browned surfaces of cooked meat tend to exhibit much more intense meaty flavour than the interior portion due to uneven heating.
As a process technology, Cell Essence is agnostic to cell species, cell type and even whether the cells are cultivated or extracted from real meat!
Moreover, due to its nature as a standalone flavouring ingredient opens up the potential applications of Cell Essence beyond just in producing meat alternatives.
To reduce production cost, much effort has gone into decreasing the per unit cost of cultivating cells. We have taken a complementary approach that asks: What if we could use fewer cells to generate the same meaty flavour as more cells?
To minimize such inefficiencies and maximize the cost-performance ratio of each cell, Cell Essence uses a patented process to extract and amplify the natural flavours of every cell prior to product integration, enabling one cell to generate the equivalent flavour of many.
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