Shiok Meats Partners With Mirai Foods to Bring Cultivated Beef to Singapore

Shiok Meats’ subsidiary Gaia Foods and Swiss-based deep food tech Mirai Foods, have entered into a strategic partnership to develop cultivated beef.

Singapore is leading the world in cultivated meat approval, as the first and only country to have approved the sale and distribution of cell-based meat. In 2020, it gave California’s Eat Just the green light for its cultivated chicken meat.

Cultivated beef

Now, Singapore’s Shiok Foods is working to speed cultivated beef to market with one-of-a-kind bovine muscle and fat stem cells from Mirai Foods. According to the companies, these essential building blocks for cultivated beef are natural, pure, and non-genetically modified cells from premium cattle breeds. Shiok says these are hard to come by in Singapore.

Sandhya Sriram, Group CEO at Shiok Meats and Gaia Foods, says the new partnership is the result of a strong relationship developing with Mirai. “Whilst we will leverage our regulatory status and expertise to help Mirai accelerate its market entry in Singapore, we are also eyeing on potential production and distribution of our seafood products in Switzerland, a high purchasing power market with a strong first adoption mindset,” Sriram said.

“We are excited to partner with one of the world’s leading cultivated seafood producers and their subsidiary cultivated meat company to extend the culinary choice for Singaporean consumers to premium, Swiss quality cultivated beef”, Christoph Mayr, CEO at Mirai Foods, said in a statement.

“Partnering with a Singaporean company is particularly interesting for us given the country’s strong distribution and partnership network across the Asia Pacific region, which has been showing a growing appetite for safe, high-quality beef”, he adds.

Cultivated seafood in Singapore

While Mirai is providing tools to enable Shiok to speed to market, Shiok is bringing regulatory information and know-how to the Swiss food tech company.

Late last month, Shiok partnered with Vietnam’s Minh Phu Seafood to develop a combined R&D facility to help bring cultivated seafood to Asia.

“Setting up a joint R&D facility with Minh Phu Seafood is a major milestone for us,” Dr. Sandhya Sriram, Group CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Shiok Meats, said in a statement. “Our vision has always been collaborating with established seafood companies and hatcheries to add variety to the portfolio and food security narrative through aquaculture innovation, research, and tech transfer. Our satellite R&D facility in Vietnam will focus on high-quality cultivated shrimp research and technology.”