Hoxton Farms is a London-based food-tech company that cultivates real animal fat as an ingredient for the meat alternatives industry. Its cultivated lipids are aimed at improving the taste, cooking properties, and texture that plant oils (coconut, sunflower, palm, canola) struggle to reproduce. The company says it uses a computational approach and bioreactors and has built a team, novel technology, and customer partnerships to enable production at scale. Hoxton plans to build a pilot facility to produce cultivated fat and demonstrate a scale-out production process. Financially, Hoxton raised $22 million in a Series A and has raised $25.7 million in total since February 2021. The financing is intended to address cost and scale challenges in cellular agriculture and advance pilot-scale manufacturing and customer deployment. Hoxton Farms develops cultivated animal fat by growing purified animal fat from a few cells in bioreactors as a cruelty-free ingredient for meat alternatives. The startup combines computational biology, mathematical modelling and tissue engineering to reduce the cost of cell culture and make production cost-effective at scale. It argues that current plant-oil fat replacements lack flavour and can have environmental drawbacks, and that cultivated fat will unlock plant-based products that look, cook and taste like real meat. Hoxton Farms is still at the R&D stage and plans to build a purpose-built lab on London’s Old Street and expand its interdisciplinary science team. The company says it will work towards a scalable prototype of its cultivated fat over the next year to 18 months. It sees early customers among plant-based meat companies and longer-term markets in cultivated meat and other industries such as bakery, confectionery and cosmetics; competitors named include Mission Barns and Peace of Meat.

Total raised

$26M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Oct 2022