Magic Valley launches lab-made pork, chasing $5m funding

Amid scrutiny of the pork industry, Magic Valley says it’s aiming to have its ‘cultivated’ and ‘humanely-made’ meat on supermarket shelves next year.

Magic Valley's pork in dumplings. Picture: Supplied

Melbourne-based agrifood start-up Magic Valley is chasing up to $5m in funding as well as regulatory approvals for its cultivated pork product, which its founder Paul Bevan says is made humanely using skin cells taken from a living pig, amid growing calls for an investigation into the pork industry.

Startling footage released this week showed pigs being stunned by carbon dioxide before slaughter, and the Greens party and others have called for more effort to be put into finding humane solutions for the pork industry.

Magic Valley says its pork is completely free of slaughter or any inhumane treatment of animals in the production process.

The company takes skin cells from a pig, which are then cultivated into stem cells using a mixture of amino acids and other nutrients used as food for cell growth, avoiding the use of animal by-products such as foetal bovine serum. Its meat is not considered vegan, though it can help remove animals from the supply chain.

Mr Bevan, a former finance executive, said his products had the same taste, texture and mouth like feel as traditional meat, especially compared to plant-based substitutes which he said would never be able to replicate real meat.

Magic Valley CEO Paul Bevan. Picture: Supplied

“Our philosophy as a company is not to use any animal components at all, and ensure that there’s no animal slaughter in the process from start to finish,” Mr Bevan said in an interview.

“Our cultivated pork products provide the exact same flavour experience for consumers that enjoy traditionally farmed pork. It is an ethical and sustainable solution and at scale, our products will be much cheaper than traditional alternatives.

“It’s obvious that with traditional methods you can’t ethically produce pork products, or any animal products for that matter. And we know there is a real demand driven particularly by younger consumers around the ethics of their food choices, whether that relates to animal welfare, or sustainability and greenhouse gas emissions and those sorts of things.”

Next on the menu for Magic Valley is cultivated beef, with its sights set on regulation come 2024. The company, which has seven staff, is also raising $5m to be able to scale up and get into supermarkets and restaurants across the country, and eventually at a global scale.

“I self-funded the business for the first couple of years, and we raised a pre-seed funding round at the end of 2021,” he said. “That’s seen us through until this point, so we’re looking to raise our seed round at the moment on the back of the pork product launch. We were looking do that at the end of last year but macroeconomic conditions make it difficult.

“The seed round will enable us to scale up production, get into a pilot plant facility and get regulatory approval for our products.”

Magic Valley cultivated meat. Picture: Supplied

Mr Bevan said the global cultivated meat market is set to reach $630bn by 2040, giving Australia an opportunity to be leaders in the market.

“We absolutely want to go global, we think there’s a large demand in China and the Middle East for this type of product,” he said.

“We’re quite lucky here in Australia in terms of the existing framework, we’re considered a novel food product, so there’s a statutory nine-month time frame for approvals to occur, which is good compared to other regions which are quite open-ended.”

Magic Valley is expecting its products to be on supermarket shelves by the end of 2024.

“Unstructured meat products are the easiest to produce, but the next products we would like to develop would be the more structured products, which would be things like steaks or chop, for example. We think we have an enormous opportunity here.”