Ask the Ants

Ants Innovate is a deep tech innovation start-up founded in 2020, Singapore, as a spin-off from A*STAR. We are the first cultivated whole meat cut company in Southeast Asia. We are mostly passionate young people who want to see a world with animal-free meat production. Our mission is to create the complete meat-eating experience in cultivated premium meat cuts for mass market. We are an industry enabler and a translator of technology to products. We develop critical intellectual properties on functional ingredients to enable companies in both the plant-based and cultivated meat industry to make premium meat cuts. We also work with strategic partners in supply chain and distribution to commercialise our functional ingredients and our derivative products.

An ant colony is made up of mainly sister worker ants who are all equal and work together towards a common goal. Ants are amazing creatures, they have one of the longest lifespan of any insect, they are able to lift 50x their body weight and have excellent communication skills. Just like ants, everyone here spent time to work on the ground to innovate; and everyone is given as much authority as possible to make decisions on the ground. Ants Innovate operates with a lattice-like management model. Leadership is demonstrated, not appointed. We are a lean company that aspires to be a significant industry enabler.

Ants Innovate is technology and product development powerhouse. We serve both plant- and cell-based industry with a single approach, producing meaty functional ingredients for alternative protein industry. Functional ingredients are modular ingredients exhibiting significant meat properties, such as the Cell EssenceTM to control meaty aroma, fibrous base or natural meaty colouring. We focus on developing relevant functional ingredients to produce cultivated meat cuts with complete meat-eating experience at mass market cost!

Cultivated meat, sometimes called lab-grown, clean, cell-based or cultured meat, is grown in a lab from a few animal cells, into raw ingredients that are structured into minced meat products. It's made of the same animal proteins as the real meat, but it doesn't require animals to be slaughtered the way traditional meat does. Under the microscope; however, cultivated meat as raw ingredients do not have the hierarchical tissue architectures of the conventional animal meat. Some features of the real meat cuts can be incorporated by either converting cells into contracting muscle strips in a secondary bioreactor, or by our functional ingredient approach (for technical explanation, please watch the GFI-APAC alternative protein seminar). The current cultivated meats are all hybrid products, with plant-based ingredients as the base material and 1-70% cells as flavour or texture enhancement. Cultivated cells have no colour so most of the meat colours have to be added using food-safe artificial colouring, or our natural meat colouring ingredient.

You need to try it when it’s launch!

We will have our first product lines launching very soon, stay tuned to find out more! We aspire to launch new product lines incorporating new technologies regularly.

We have low cost as a key design goal and have simplified the manufacturing process and ingredient list, as well as the cell and food production strategies. We use cells for their meaty flavours so our premium quality products will be priced competitively with conventional meat.

All our current plant-based and cell-based ingredients are non-GMO.

For our range of plant-based products, we have vegan-based products which is 100% vegan! For our meat-free products, they contain egg white for vegetarians and flexitarians. For cell-based products, they contain animal proteins.