Cultivated Meat

The Better Butchers was started in September of 2022 with the goal of building the world’s first cultivated meat butchery.

We spent our first year working on cultivated meat technology and forged research collaborations/partnerships with McMaster University. The cultivated meat research focused on developing a method to immortalize pig cells and food grade growth media. We are also part of a 4 year Genome Canada project on Cultivated Meat where we test different methodology and solutions from professors, researchers and engineers involved in the consortium to validate before commercialization. We made significant progress but realized that we still had lots of work left to do (from both a product development and regulatory standpoint). Regulatory approval could take up to 3 years once a finalized process has been submitted.

In addition, we initiated research on mycelium development, mushroom technology to produce high quality protein that would allow us to create cultivated meat/plant based hybrids to offset the high costs of cultivated meat manufacturing resulting in an accessible finished product.

In March of 2024 we decided that as we continue to understand pathways to commercialize cultivated meat and wait additional years to gain regulatory approval we would initially launch plant protein/mushroom-based products to establish the brand and begin building out our sales and distribution network.

Our forager’s finest line of products currently includes 3 ground meat skus (Natural, Chorizo, and Italian). They are selling well across B.C. with plans to expand eastwards as well as down into the U.S. We are actively working on adding new SKUS to this lineup including burgers, sausages, chunks/strips, and whole cuts.

Our work on cultivated/lab-grown meat technology continues as we are an industry partner with the University of Alberta to share our findings from McMaster as well as include our cells to further research to result in information to narrow down our cultivated meat development research. 

We are actively working with more companies involved in cellular agriculture that can help us complement the development of high quality meat alternatives and we anticipate our first product launches in this space to be a hybrid of mycelium and cultivated meat/fat technologies.