Australia-based cultured meat company Magic Valley debuted its new cell-based pork bao buns at a tasting at John Gorilla Café in Brunswick, Victoria.

The tasting event hosted an array of guests, representing various sectors with an interest in future technology, future food-tech and the alt-protein industry.

Magic Valley stated that their presence and positive feedback “reflected a resounding confidence in the industry’s potential for sustainable growth and innovation as newer cultivated meat start-ups like Magic Valley pioneer technology which avoids scalability issues”.

The company said that incorporating fresh and delicate flavours in this new presentation of its pork product accentuated its quality and highlighted how indistinguishable it is from traditional pork meat in terms of taste.

Magic Valley’s production process is differentiated by its scalable iPSC technology, which involves taking a small skin biopsy from a live animal, culturing the cells in FBS-free media, reprogramming them into iPSCs and then characterising and differentiating the cells into muscle and fat within bioreactors.

The result is a real animal meat product; however, no animals are killed and no animal products are used aside from the initial cell biopsy. As iPSCs can grow indefinitely, all that is required to create unlimited quantities of meat is the initial skin scraping, which Magic Valley said makes its process “much more scalable and ethical than older methods of producing cultivated meat”.

Beyond the importance of scalable technology, replicating the taste of traditional meat is a primary challenge for the cell-based meat industry in order to capture the interest of prospective consumers by creating products that taste indistinguishable from traditionally sourced meat.

The recipe for this new presentation of Magic Valley’s cultivated pork was designed by Wendy Chua, Magic Valley’s senior research assistant. Chua said: “The goal in creating cultivated pork bao buns was to craft a dish with delicate flavours that complement, rather than overshadow, the rich umami and savoury notes of our cultivated pork. In allowing the incredible taste of the cultivated pork mince that we are incredibly proud of to take centre stage, we can truly showcase the potential of this technology.”

Emma Coath, managing director of agri-food start-up accelerator Rocket Seeder, commented: “I was very lucky to taste Magic Valley lamb and pork last night – it was delicious! It was also great to see the reactions from people who haven’t eaten meat for many years.”

Eleanor Bignell, operations and strategy at tech company OK200 Software & Apps, added: “Honestly, the flavours were so rich and authentic, they could easily rival traditional meat…I’m excited about what this means for the future of food: delicious, ethical and sustainable.”

Jessica Freitag, advocacy and communications at Cellular Agriculture Australia, concluded: “This week I ate meat for the first time in five years – all thanks to the incredible work being done at Magic Valley. I had the opportunity to sample its cultivated pork bao bun and cultivated lamb meatball…the products truly were ‘indistinguishable’ from what I remember traditional meat products to taste like (a sentiment echoed by the meat-eaters sitting next to me).”

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