Cultivated meat companies most frequently focus on the largest meat categories- beef, chicken and pork. However, Primeval Foods has stepped away from the norm and is concentrating its efforts on more exotic fare.
“We are currently working on: the Siberian tiger, leopard, black panther, Bengal tiger, white lion, lion, and zebra. We sourced cells of the big cats from captive animals, and for the zebra, we sourced it from an exotic meat market,” Yilmaz Bora, Managing Partner of Ace Ventures, told FoodNavigator.
Most of us aren’t used to seeing zebra on the menu — and big cats are unlikely to have made the dinner table in the majority of our homes. So why has Primeval set its sights on such a unique niche?
Primeval points to the fact that no other animal has been domesticated since the agricultural revolution. This, the company argued means the trillion-dollar meat market is ‘wide open’ for start-ups who are willing to ‘double down on innovative ideas’.
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Of course, regulation remains a significant hurdle for the cellular meat sector in Europe the US and UK. To date, the only food safety authority to greenlight the sale of cultivated meat globablly remains Singapore. But Bora believes this is a technology that has come of age.
