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Dutch cultivated meat company Meatable is partnering with contract manufacturer Esco Aster to become Singapore’s first cultivated pork producer. The partnership will enable Meatable to cultivate pork for dumplings, sausages and other products in what the company claims is a first for Singapore. The collaboration aims to have the pork ready for retail by 2025. Meatable’s mission is to provide meat that does not harm the planet, animals or humans. The company has created pork with the same structure, texture and flavour as traditional meat and matches its nutritional profile. Hans Huistra, COO of Meatable, said: "Over the past four years, we’ve been constantly innovating and developing our technology to get it to the stage where we can perfectly recreate some of the meat products we all know and love. Esco Aster will enable us in developing, upscaling and realising our first consumer products, together we will make a positive impact on the Singaporean meat industry." Esco Aster was founded in Singapore in 2017 and according to the company is the first and only production facility worldwide to be given regulatory approval to produce cultivated meat products in the country. In 2020 Singapore approved cultivated meat production with the Esco Aster facility, becoming the first country to do so. The approval came as part of Singapore’s 30 by 30 strategy, in which the country aims to produce 30% of its nutritional needs locally and sustainably by 2030. The country currently imports 90% of its food. The partnership is poised to tackle this issue and help the country achieve its sustainability goals. Xiangliang Lin, CEO at Esco Aster, said: “With our scientific expertise, operational know-how and enabling technologies, we believe that we can help companies reach their milestones and advance to the next step of cultivated meat production with market approval at scale.” Meatable’s opti-ox technology only needs one single cell sample, retrieved harmlessly from an animal, to replicate the natural growth of muscle and fat to create real meat. This technology can be used for other types of meat such as beef or fish and allows Meatable to bypass the use of fetal bovine serum.