This $10 Million Food Tech Company Is Growing Sausage From Pig Cells

Food technology company New Age Meats grows sausages from the cells of a pig named Jessie.

Unlike millions of pigs that are slaughtered in the meat industry every year, Jessie — named on the New Age website as Chief Sausage Officer — isn’t harmed in the process of making the sausages.

Scientists extracted, then multiplied cells from her body. These cells were induced into muscle and fat. The end result is a product that looks, tastes, and sizzles like a traditional pork sausage, but it’s slaughter-free.

According to This Is Money, New Age Meats is the first clean meat company to attempt to grow sausages.

Agronomics — a clean meat investment firm chaired by Innocent Drinks founder Richard Reed — invested in the company, valuing it at $10 million.

“Cultured meat simultaneously addresses three major issues: human health, the environment, and animal welfare,” New Age’s founder Brian Spears said in a statement, reports This Is Money. “This is the first small step we are taking to reverse climate change, stop breeding animals into a life that’s not worth living and to help humans become healthier.”

It’s expected that New Age Meats’s sausages will become commercially available by 2021. But they’ve already been successfully taste-tested, with journalists and fellow scientists concluding that Jessie’s cell-based sausages taste just like traditional meat.

The New Age Meats website says, “7.4 billion humans live on earth. We keep around 40 billion animals for food. Some of them live happy lives, but the vast majority do not. Our first pork sausages were made from a few cells from a pig named Jessie. In the future, we won’t need cells or meat from animals, allowing them to live their own, natural lives.”

The Rise of Clean Meat

The clean meat industry is expanding; more and more companies are attempting to grow animal meat without killing any animals.

Agronomics hopes to build a portfolio of ten to 15 clean meat companies; New Age is its second investment, its first was BlueNalu, a clean meat company specializing in seafood.

BlueNalu hopes to serve lab-grown yellowtail and mahi-mahi fish this year, and expects to be the first company to launch clean seafood products on an industrial scale. Lobster, crab, orange roughy, and Chilean sea bass are next up on the company’s agenda.

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