The company growing real animal fat without any animals
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BY JOE ROWAN, August 1 2024
Alternative meat has a taste problem: made without animal fat, it often lacks the authentic texture and mouthfeel of ârealâ meat. Hoxton Farms solves this by producing genuine animal fat as a food ingredient â just fat thatâs been cultivated in a lab rather than taken from a dead animal.
So, how does Hoxton Farms do it? It starts off with the cells of the animal whose fat they are trying to grow – currently, for example, they are focusing on pork fat. These cells are then placed in bioreactors, large tanks where there is food for the cells and enough oxygen to optimise growth. After about two weeks, the food for the cells is changed, and they are triggered to start turning into fat cells. Rather than doubling, they increase in size, and after another two weeks they are ready to be harvested – removed, washed, and ready to eat.
Hoxton Farms grew from its co-foundersâ interest in cooking. Having known each other since they were at nursery in North London, Ed Steele and Max Jamilly, both 32, came up with the idea for the company when the latter started growing cells in the lab as part of his PhD, and asked himself what they might taste like. âWe both cook a lot, and when you cook with most plant-based products, they just donât cook in the way youâd expect them to. They donât have the same sizzle in the pan, they donât give off the same smell and aromas when theyâre cooking, and we always knew that was because they didnât have the right fat,â Steele says. âSo we started putting traditional animal fat – pork fat and beef fat – into plant-based products, to see if that would make a difference to the taste of the products, and it dramatically improved them and got us excited.â Soon after, they founded the startup.
Before Hoxton Farms, Steele studied Mathematics at Oxford University and Imperial College London, before working as a machine-learning researcher at the London fintech Thought Machine. After that he helped one of his professors from Oxford to set up a new company providing mathematical modelling and data analysis in industries ranging from genetics, to sport, legal tech, and finance. Jamilly, on the other hand, worked as a consultant for health tech startup Jelly Drops and food tech startup Legendairy Foods after obtaining his PhD in synthetic biology from Oxford University.
The startup is named âHoxton Farmsâ because Steele and Jamilly came up with the idea in a pub in Hoxton, in North-East London, however it also appears to be a case of nominative determinism. âWe later found out that the name Hoxton actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon âHogsâ townâ, because itâs the area just outside of the City of London where the pigs were kept. It felt like the right name for us,â Steele says.Â
The company has made beef fat before too, and plans on working with chicken, lamb, and fish. Its new product development chef, Josh Hatfield, used to run the Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant Kol in Marylebone, London, and has made pork belly, bacon, meatballs, Xiaolongbao (a soup dumpling where the fat is both inside and outside), sausage rolls, and ramen, where the soup base contains the fat and has pork belly on top too.
The 40-45 strong company raised its Series A financing of roughly $22 million around 18 months ago, and is now looking to get regulatory approval so that its cultivated pork fat can be used by plant-based meat companies. âWhat weâre trying to do here is not just build a company that makes a profit, and can get some products on some supermarket shelves, but really, weâre trying to change the way that people eat, and if weâre going to do that we do need to get to a really, really large scale. So thatâs the goal,â Steele says.
If you bought some of Hoxton Farmsâ merchandise at THE HEAT 2024, you were entered into a raffle whose prize was a meal at the companyâs headquarters in North-East London prepared by its Michelin-starred chef Hatfield. All proceeds from this went to Hackney Food Bank, a local charity that helps ensure people have access to food.
Learn more about Hoxton Farms at HoxtonFarms.com.
