BSF Enterprise and Ivy Farm enter partnership to accelerate cultivated meat in China

BSF, the biotech and industrial tissue engineering company and owner of UK-based tissue engineering company, 3D Bio-Tissues (3DBT) and corneal tissue replacement company, Kerato, has announced it is now working with the UK's leading cultivated meat production company, Ivy Farm Technologies to help fundraise, launch and scale its cultivated meat plans in China.

BSF Enterprise (Hong Kong) Ltd (BSF HK) was recently formed as a separate entity under the BSF Enterprise umbrella to develop a distribution and partner network in the Greater China market. Given BSF HK's strong presence and investor network within the Asian cultivated meat and tissue engineering market, it is looking to partner and work with a number of other biotech and green tech companies. The commercial agreement with Ivy Farm will involve generating and progressing investment opportunities to support the company's fundraising ambitions. BSF subsidiary company 3DBT is also working with Ivy Farm to test its City Mix serum-free media within its products with the goal of reducing the cost of cultivated meat production in the Asian market.

Ivy Farm was spun out from the University of Oxford in 2019. Its unique technology produces nutritious mincemeat from premium Wagyu beef, Aberdeen Angus, and English Large White pork tissue to create products such as meatballs, scotch eggs and burgers. In 2022, Ivy Farm unveiled a pilot plant in Oxford with production capabilities of 2.8 tons of cultivated meat a year, all powered by solar, the largest of its kind in Europe.

BSF will be supporting Ivy Farm's ongoing funding round, aimed at facilitating the scaling up of technology to accommodate large production-sized fermenters. In the future, Ivy Farm envisions producing 12,000 tons from a single efficient facility, fully powered by renewable energy, thereby slashing greenhouses gases by 92% and land use by 90% compared to industrial farming practices. The production of cultivated meat at scale is critical, especially considering China's annual consumption of over 100 million tons of meat, which constitutes more than a quarter of global meat consumption.

Professor Cathy Ye, Co-Founder of Ivy Farm and Director at the Oxford Centre for Tissue Engineering and Bioprocessing (OCTEB), expressed her enthusiasm about the partnership, emphasizing her personal connection to China where she was raised and earned her Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Dalian University of Technology. She highlighted the significant potential for sustainable food security in the region that can be enables by the unique cell lines and technology created at Ivy Farm.

"Today's announcement represents the start of a strong commercial and technical working relationship between BSF Enterprise and Ivy Farm," commented Che Connon, Managing Director of BSF Enterprise & CEO of 3DBT. "The cultivated meat market is front and center for China in its blueprint for food security as part of its five-year agricultural plan. We look forward to helping Ivy Farm enter the China market through securing investment and working with key manufacturers to develop a variety of cultivated meat products that can serve a significant, growing market."