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 takes a technology-focused, ingredient-based approach that pragmatically draws upon plant-based and cultivated proteins to provide the alternative proteins industry with functional ingredients that exhibit significant meat-like properties. Our functional ingredients are designed to be modularly deployed to produce hybrid meat alternatives that deliver the complete meat-eating experience at mass market cost!

Cultivated meat, also called cell-based, cultured, lab-grown or clean meat, is currently grown in a lab starting from a few animal cells, resulting in cell-based raw ingredients that are further structured into minced meat products. It is made of the same animal proteins as traditional meat, but it does not require animals to be slaughtered, unlike the latter.

Under the microscope; however, cultivated cells as raw ingredients often do not have the hierarchical tissue architectures of conventional animal-based meat. Some features of real meat cuts can be replicated either by encouraging cells to assemble into contracting muscle strips in a secondary bioreactor, or by our functional ingredient approach using non-animal proteins (for a technical explanation, please watch the GFI-APAC alternative protein seminar).

Current cultivated meats are all hybrid products, typically with plant-based ingredients as the base material and 15 - 70% cells as flavour or texture enhancement. Cultivated cells have no colour, so most of the meat-like colours have to be added using food-safe artificial colourings, or our natural meat colouring ingredient.

You need to try it when it’s launched!

We will have our first ingredient product lines launching soon, and are currently working hard with potential customers in food service to craft tasty and affordable meat alternative dishes that utilize our functional ingredients that replicate meat flavour and texture - stay tuned to find out more!

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.

We have a variety of 100% vegan products, meat-free products which contain egg white and are suitable for vegetarians and flexitarians, and cell-based products which contain animal proteins.