JUST’s Director of Cellular Agriculture Launches Own Cultured Meat StartUp

It was reported that Eitan Fischer has left his position as the Director of Cellular Agriculture of Just (formerly Hampton Creek) to start his company called Mission Barns. Just has confirmed to Gizmodo that Fischer as well as researcher David Bowman have left the company for Mission Barns.

Fischer joined Just in 2016 when co-founders Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk asked Fischer to lead a new division of the company dedicated to making cultured meat via cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture is the field of growing animal products, like meat, from cells. Without requiring animals.

According to Paul Shapiro’s Clean Meat, Fischer was working towards starting his own cultured meat startup when he was approached to join Just. “It was a no brainer,” Fischer told Shapiro, “starting with a few million in seed stage funding versus joining a billion-dollar company…I didn’t have a difficult choice to make”.

It is unclear how the departure of their Director of Cellular Agriculture will impact Just’s timeline. Just only publicly announced that they are entering the cultured meat space in 2017 and that they will have the first product to market by 2018. This is a lot earlier than other companies making cultured meat, such as Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat, which plan to have their cultured meat products commercial by 2021.

My name is Ahmed Khan, and I am the Editor of CellAgri. Please subscribe to my email newsletter at www.cell.ag to get the latest research and news, which I share exclusively with my email subscribers. We are regularly tweeting out interesting articles and thoughts via twitter @Cellagritech