How a Cultivated Meat Startup Stayed Alive While Competitors Collapsed

Dr. Yuki Hanyu started the Shojinmeat Project in 2014 as an open-source DIY cell-cultured meat hobby. High school students were growing animal cells in their bedrooms in Japan. NHK televised one of them nationwide. That publicity led to seed funding for IntegriCulture, the for-profit spin-off. A decade later, while better-funded cultivated meat companies in the US and Europe have gone under, IntegriCulture turned profitable last year.

The Problem with Current Cultivated Meat

The cultivated meat industry is still in what Hanyu calls the "stunt phase." Most products are one-off experiences in fancy restaurants, not supermarket staples. The core technical problem is that current methods produce a "slurry of cells" in large steel tank bioreactors. This slurry has the chemical composition of meat but none of the texture. You cannot make a chicken breast or a steak from it—only a formless paste that companies then try to reshape into something recognizable.

Hanyu estimates that even the best current products achieve only about 70 percent imitation of real meat. The gap is structural, not chemical. "It is not making steak," he says. "It is making like a slurry of cells. So you have to modify the slurry of cells to taste and look like meat, but it's not quite the actual muscle tissue."