The food industry needs a new kind of fat — I’m using AI to make it

The world has a big fat problem.

Fat is the foundation of flavour. It carries taste, creates texture, and gives food its satisfying mouthfeel. Anyone who’s eaten crispy pork belly or a Wagyu burger can attest to its power.

But the food industry needs an oil change. Today’s fats and oils are unhealthy, unsustainable and unreliable.

Food manufacturers are desperate for high-performance fats that meet ESG targets. As meat consumption rises, they’re increasingly concerned about supply chain security. Meanwhile, consumers seeking healthier alternatives to traditional meat are often let down by the price, taste and nutrition of meat alternatives, such as lab-grown meat. Bad fats are largely to blame.

The industry needs a new kind of fat — one that delivers on taste, health and sustainability, while being scalable and affordable. That’s where my business, Hoxton Farms, comes in.

Two lipid lovers walk into nursery school

My co-founder and I, Max, go way back. We first met in nursery school, but our paths diverged at university. I became a mathematician and machine learning expert, while Max specialised in synthetic biology, earning an Oxford PhD.

Importantly, though, we are both avid home cooks who appreciate the difference that great ingredients make.

At our F&B startup Hoxton Farms, we are combining our expertise to develop a uniquely scalable way to make animal fat — without the animals. Our first product is cultivated pork fat. It has the same rich flavour and texture as conventional fat, just made in a different way.

Hoxton Fat can be used in any food that benefits from high-quality animal fat, whether it’s making juicier sausages, healthier pastries, or richer sauces.

Making fat at food scale

The biggest challenge when growing cultivated fat is cost and scale. The cell cultivation process was originally developed for pharmaceuticals, where higher profit margins are the norm. But food is different: to make a real impact, we need to produce tens of thousands of tonnes of fat at prices consumers can afford.

In the early stages of the industry, some cultivated meat companies scaled production prematurely without solving the cost problem, believing producing affordably was a challenge that they could delay addressing. But in today’s economic climate, producing great products at palatable costs is non-negotiable to meet customer spending needs.

That’s where machine learning comes in. Optimising hundreds of variables to hit our target: the tastiest pork fat, at the lowest possible cost.

Robots are making fat now

Our competitive advantage is “Percy” — our in-house machine learning platform. Trained on >25 billion data points, Percy helps optimise every stage of our process, combined with a high-throughput platform driven by robotics and computer vision.

Take one of our biggest cost drivers: media (basically the food we feed our cells). Our media recipes often have over 60 ingredients, including vitamins, proteins, and sugars.

Percy helps us to optimise media recipes, balancing cost and performance. It will take all the ingredients in a recipe and suggest new combinations in different ratios. Robotic systems will test these recipes with cells. Computer vision algorithms then analyse microscope images to identify which cells have grown best, and this data loops back into Percy to refine future suggestions. Using this system, we cut media costs by more than 100x last year.

This is just the beginning of using machine learning for cultivated products. Growing fat at large scale and low cost is a big challenge, but one AI is poised to help us solve. I’m glad Hoxton Farms is on the forefront of this movement, on the way to cultivating a deliciously fatty future.

Ed Steele, co-founder of Hoxton Farms

Ed is a mathematician with master’s degrees from Oxford in Mathematics and Imperial in Computer Science. He started his career as a machine learning engineer at a venture-backed fintech, before moving into mathematical modelling. He co-founded Hoxton Farms with his childhood friend, Max Jamilly in 2020.

Learn more about Hoxton Farms