[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Hoxton Farms.]
UK-based cultivated fat startup Hoxton Farms and Japanese chemicals giant Mitsui Chemicals have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate biomanufacturing in food, cosmetics, pharma, and sustainable materials.
Mitsui Chemicals has also made a strategic investment in Hoxton Farms as part of the collaboration, revealed the partners, who aim to incorporate Mitsui’s advanced materials into Hoxton Farms’ bioreactors and explore ways to scale production of cultivated fat and other cell-based products across multiple industry sectors.
Hoxton Farms, which recently teamed up with Japanese firm Sumitomo Corporation to integrate Hoxton’s fats into food products, plans to incorporate a specialty polymer developed by Mitsui into its bioreactors, CEO Max Jamilly told AgFunderNews.
“This polymer will improve COGS, yield and manufacturability, helping us reach large-scale commercial production,” said Jamilly, a synthetic biologist who teamed up with mathematician and computer scientist Ed Steele in 2020 to launch Hoxton Farms.
Initially, he said, Hoxton is “using Mitsui Chemicals’ materials to improve Hoxton Farms’ bioreactors, focusing on the production of Hoxton’s fat. In future, though, the technology could encompass biomanufacturing for a much broader range of applications including drug discovery, regenerative medicine and cell and gene therapy.
“Mitsui Chemicals’ combined expertise in materials science and global manufacturing makes them an ideal partner for that journey.”
Lower cost biomanufacturing
Japan has prioritized biomanufacturing as part of its bioeconomy strategy, while there are also government-led efforts to boost the tech in South Korea and China, said Jamilly, who is building manufacturing and commercial partnerships across APAC ahead of market launches in 2026/7.
But scalable, cost-effective biomanufacturing infrastructure remains a critical bottleneck.
Most players in the nascent cultivated meat industry use stirred tank reactors: steel vessels with built-in paddles that stir the contents to keep the cells evenly suspended and to ensure they receive enough oxygen and nutrients, he said.
Hoxton Farms, in contrast, has developed proprietary bioreactors Jamilly claims enable it to scale up in a modular fashion with significantly lower capex and operating costs.
The “ultra scale-out” (USO) bioreactors are “designed specifically for the unique challenges of cost-effective stem cell culture at massive scale,” he explained. “Unlike legacy stirred tank reactors (STRs), which scale up by increasing vessel size, we scale out by automating a large number of small, low-cost modular reactors in parallel like the servers in an AI data center.
“STRs are expensive, complex and ill-suited to very large-scale cell culture production. The largest STRs are about 20,000-liters, barely enough to satisfy a fraction of the global appetite for cultivated meat. USOs have >10x lower capex than legacy STRs, with less technical risk, shorter build times, lower operating costs and higher yields.”
Cultivated fat: High-impact, low-inclusion ingredient
While the unit economics of cultivated meat are challenging, cultivated fat grows more quickly than muscle and is a “high-impact, low-inclusion rate” ingredient by comparison, said Jamilly.
“At the moment, we’re producing from our pilot site in London, but now that we’re building partnerships around the world, we’re looking at establishing manufacturing partnerships with our customers as well. We are very well placed to scale and come to market in partnership with our b2b customers.”
On the regulatory front, Hoxton is preparing to make a submission to regulators in the UK shortly, with applications in the US and Singapore expected to follow by the end of the year. The firm is also working closely with the Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture (JACA), to help navigate the regulatory process in Japan.
Further reading:
Hoxton Farms and Sumitomo strike strategic partnership to bring cultivated fat to Japan, APAC
Inside the UK cultivated meat regulatory sandbox with Mosa Meat, Hoxton Farms, and BlueNalu
🎥Hoxton Farms tackles fat, the final frontier for alt meat
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