Ivy Farm partners with Dennis Group on new plant

British cultivated meat company, Ivy Farm Technologies, has partnered with Dennis Group to develop engineering plans and designs for its first manufacturing plant.

Ivy Farm grows pork muscle fat from stem cells in fermentation tanks. The state-of-the-art facility is expected to feature fermentation tanks with a 200,000-litre capacity that produce at least 12,000 tons of cultivated meat annually.

Global design-build firm, Dennis Group, specialises in food processing facilities and has worked with companies such as Danone and Kerry Group. The partnership will initially involve Dennis Group providing engineering plans and designs for the proposed manufacturing facility.

Once the plans are approved, the next step will involve identifying a suitable location for the plant. In a statement, Ivy Farm said that as part of this process it “will be considering markets such as the USA and countries within Asia and the Middle East, where there are clear regulatory pathways for cultivated meat”.

Ivy Farm’s CEO, Rich Dillon, said: “Dennis Group understands the scale and ambition of our company…and we look forward to them scaling up our pilot plant design and engineering this innovative large-scale facility. We believe by focusing on a launch market with a more favourable regulatory environment, such as the USA and Singapore, we’ll be able to make the biggest difference in the most efficient way.

He added: “The UK will remain a key operational area for us, where we’ll continue to apply some of the smartest science and tech out there, to refine and develop our products”.

The company’s streamlined manufacturing technologies and end-to-end processes are said to be cost-effective and scalable. Its research and development will remain in Oxford, UK, where it opened what it claims to be Europe’s largest working pilot plant facility in August 2022.