More 3D-printed steaks are coming to Europe

STORY: Your steak could soon be 3D-printed.

That’s if you live in Europe.

Israeli company Redefine Meat has struck a partnership with importer Giraudi Meats to drive European distribution of its ‘New Meat’ steak cuts.

The start-up is hoping to establish its products as an alternative to conventionally produced meat.

Redefine Meat operates large-scale meat printers at its Rehovot headquarters south of Tel Aviv, as well as in a new factory in the Netherlands.

Manager of the company's 3D-printers project Yaron Eshel explains how it works.

“When I want to create my steak I have a library of a few different slabs, I can choose each one of them and I can adjust it accordingly. I can define the amount of marbling, the internal fat, or the external fat.”

“And now I can start and go and print it and produce it...This is my queue, this is my timeline for today, I know that in an hour or something from now I will need to refill the machine with new materials. But now I can go directly into the printing process, and you can see how the process starts to build layer by layer.”

The company makes its products from ingredients including soy and pea proteins, chickpeas, beetroot, nutritional yeasts and coconut fat.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Eshchar Ben-Shitrit said Redefine Meat was launching tenderloin and striploin steaks.

“In the past two years we have been working deeply on understanding meat and what makes meat so exciting and we identified a few components that we can recreate from plants and have the same exact performance as the tissue of animal meat, giving you, with a combination of additive manufacturing, the exact feeling you experience (with) a good steak, a good cut of meat, coming from an animal, without the use of the animal.”

Plant-based meat alternatives have become increasingly popular in recent years.

Spanish startup Novameat is also using 3D printing technology to manufacture vegetarian steaks.

But the early hype about plant-based meat alternatives has ebbed

as inflation and recession worries have driven some customers back to cheaper animal meat products.

Companies such as U.S.-based Beyond Meat have cut their sales outlooks.

Redefine Meat, however, has big ambitions.

Its New Meat is currently available in Israel, Britain, the Netherlands and Germany.

Almost 1,000 restaurants are currently paying about $40 per 2 pounds for its steak cuts.

The company plans to launch its products at restaurants and butchers in France, then in Italy, Greece and Sweden later this year, and in dozens more countries in 2023.

“We see a world in a decade from now that new meat, or meat made from plants, is a big part of the meat industry. It replaces a lot of the meat that people consume today that is bad for the environment and bad for the most, most of the people in the supply chain. I still believe that people will consume high-quality meat forever, coming from animals, and these two industries will live side by side.”

“Even when we will become one percent, two percent, and the industry will become 10 percent of the meat industry, the impact on the planet is so big that it’s worthwhile to pursue it in the next decade.”