NC is a leading pork and poultry producer. Now, a company wants to grow chicken in a lab.
Growing chickens and hogs is big business in North Carolina.
Now, a company that grows its meat in a lab instead of in barns is looking to Eastern North Carolina for the location of its first commercial-scale facility.
Believer Meats is investing more than $123 million to build a manufacturing facility in Wilson Corporate Park. When complete, the Wilson facility will employ about 100 people, with Believer targeting the production of about 22 million pounds of meat a year.
Yaakov Nahmias, an Israeli professor, founded the company as Future Meat Technologies in 2018. In November 2022, the company changed its name to the more marketable Believer Meats.
The company operates a pilot plant in Rehovot, Israel, and was looking for somewhere to scale up production.
The Believer Meats announcement comes less than a month after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made Upside Foods the first company to receive key regulatory approvals for its lab-grown chicken products. Upside still needs approvals from the U.S. Department of Agriculture before it can go to market.
Believer Meats is working toward those approvals as well.
“North Carolina’s leadership in agribusiness and biotechnology, combined with the largest and most diverse manufacturing workforce in the southeastern United States, will help the company meet the future food demands of a growing global population,” N.C. Commerce Secretary Machelle Baker Sanders said in a written statement.
Average annual wages at the Wilson facility will be $60,087, according to an announcement from Gov. Roy Cooper’s office. The project will receive a $500,000 grant from the One North Carolina Fund, although Believer Meats must hit capital investment and job creation targets to receive payment.
The News & Observer spoke with Kash Muthuraman, Believer Meats’ vice president of operations. Some of these answers have been edited for brevity or clarity.
N&O: Why is Believer Meats an exciting development for the future of food, and why did you make the jump to the company?
Muthuraman: I think it’s super exciting to be starting at the early end of a journey that’s going to take many, many years at Believer.
We, and I, truly believe that food is something that is going to become scarce in the not-too-distant future. I’m sure you’ve seen projections on that that are publicly available. And we look at the development that’s happened, that we are bringing to market, as an opportunity to advance the cause of making sure that food for people is provided for.
N&O: Why was North Carolina the right place this plant?
Muthuraman: We went through a very extensive search for almost nine months to eventually land in North Carolina. We saw probably over 100 sites across the U.S., we evaluated, we visited. I would say it came down to kind of three main things.
Number one, the business climate in North Carolina is very rich. There’s lots of economic development happening.
Number two, the university system, the college system there is extremely strong, and I was lucky enough to go to school at one of the colleges there, as well, briefly. Particularly the STEM area which we are looking to tap into. (Muthuraman earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from N.C. State University.)
And lastly, Wilson County itself, there’s a lot that Wilson County has done to advance technology and business. There’s an ecosystem already of pharma and biotech that we would love to be a part of.
N&O: Where are you on approval from the Food and Drug Administration?
Muthuraman: The process takes time with the FDA, as well as the USDA, so we’re talking with both of them. We’ve been in consultation with them working very collaboratively for the last several months.
We’re providing them data on our processes, data on our product, obviously, as we bring that data to them they’re going to ask us questions and we’re working on answering those questions for them.
Eventually, we’re excited about bringing it to market, we don’t have an exact timeline for the approval.
N&O: Could you walk me through how the company actually makes the product?
Muthuraman: I can at a macro level, and obviously a lot of our technology is something that is very detailed and some questions are better answered by our research and development team.
Think of bioreactors, which are large vessels where we are going to grow chicken cells to a very high cell density. Those chicken cells are then extracted and blended with the protein and eventually packaged like in a typical food factory.
Macro level, that’s the process. Obviously the bioreactor part of the process is what is unique, and that’s where we’re going to be building our own custom bioreactors to enable that.
N&O: Have you tried the product? What is it like?
Muthuraman: I have tried the product And I didn’t do a blind test — maybe I should have.
I would say it tastes very much like the actual chicken. It smells very much like the actual chicken, the flavors are very similar. So I think even a blind test it would be tough to differentiate.
This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published December 27, 2022 at 4:00 AM with the headline "NC is a leading pork and poultry producer. Now, a company wants to grow chicken in a lab.."