Study Says SCiFi Foods Plant-Based Burger Better for the Environment

SCiFi Foods, a food tech startup company based in San Francisco, California, is creating transformational meat products by combining cultivated meat with plant-based ingredients to make burgers that are close in taste to conventional beef. SCiFi burgers are made of real cultivated beef cells that were grown without the animal, and a mix of plant-based ingredients.

In July 2022, SCiFi Foods announced a massive breakthrough by becoming the first in the world to produce edible beef cell lines that grow in single-cell suspension. Single-cell suspension allows cells to be grown in standard large-scale bioreactors, enabling major economies of scale in established hardware, allowing the company to reduce the cost of growing its beef cells at scale by at least one thousand times—the biggest zero to one in cultivated meat.

A study conducted by a team of researchers led by William G. Lowrie of The Ohio State University evaluated the life cycle impacts of the novel burger were evaluated using four indicators: greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, land use, and water use. The results, published in the journal Sustainability, reveal that the SCiFi meat burger generated 87% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, required 39% less energy, 90% less land use, and 96% less water use than the comparable beef patty. According to SCiFi, they are expecting to launch their blended burger in late 2024.

For more details, visit the SCiFi Foods website or download the open-access paper on Sustainability.