Omeat, the Los Angeles-area cultivated meat company built on cattle plasma, filed an FDA GRAS notice in February 2025 asking regulators to clear its core ingredient for use at up to 90% of a finished cultivated beef product by weight. Seven months later, it withdrew that notice. It has since rebranded as Evergreen, raised another $6 million, and filed a second notice for the same substance — this time asking FDA to clear it at roughly 9% by weight, doing a single, narrower job: holding cells in place during cultivation.
Read side by side, the two filings are a rare thing in this industry: a documented, dated record of how much a company’s own regulatory ask for what counts as “cultivated” has shrunk. Neither filing states why. This is what the public record shows, and what it does not.
The substance, and what changed
Both notices concern bovine plasma protein (BPP) — protein aggregated from cattle blood plasma that Omeat collects from its own herd by plasmapheresis, the same extraction method used in human plasma donation. The company’s manufacturing process, as described in its own notice text, dilutes the plasma in calcium-free culture media, filters it in stages down to 0.2 micrometres, adjusts pH with hydrochloric acid, denatures it thermally at 80°C, then neutralises it with sodium bicarbonate. Heating releases CO₂ that aggregates the protein into a porous structure, which is what lets cells attach to it during cultivation.
What differs between the two filings is the claimed role and the claimed quantity.
| GRN 1254 (filed 18 Feb 2025) | GRN 1334 (pending, page updated 24 Sep 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Substance name | Bovine plasma protein preparation | Aggregated bovine plasma protein (aBPP) |
| Claimed role | Cell-attachment scaffold and food protein source | Cell-attachment substrate only |
| Use level in finished product | Up to 90% by weight | Approximately 9% by weight |
| Use level in culture media | Up to 90 g/kg | Not stated in the FDA listing |
| Estimated daily intake claimed | 47 g/day mean, 98 g/day at the 90th percentile | Not stated in the FDA listing |
| Intended food forms | Patties, sausages, strips, deli meats | Not itemised in the FDA listing |
| FDA status | Withdrawn — “at the notifier’s request, FDA ceased to evaluate this notice” (29 Sep 2025) | Pending, no FDA response yet |
The original notice did not treat plasma protein as an incidental processing aid. It asked FDA to accept that a cultivated beef patty could be, by weight, mostly bovine plasma protein rather than cultivated cell mass — with the protein doing double duty as both the scaffold cells grow on and the bulk of the finished food’s protein content. The estimated intake figures (47–98 grams a day) were calculated on that basis: a diet that includes the product as a meaningful protein source, not a trace ingredient.
The refiling drops the food-protein-source claim entirely. What’s left is a scaffold: material that helps cells attach and grow, present at roughly a tenth of the original claimed level, with no stated role as the product’s nutritional protein.
Practical consequence: a reader tracking “who has cleared what” in cultivated meat cannot rely on a single filing, or a company’s current marketing, to know what’s actually been asked of regulators — the ask itself moves, and the FDA inventory is the only place that shows both versions.
What is not on the record
FDA’s notice pages do not require, and Omeat’s did not provide, a stated reason for the withdrawal. Two explanations are consistent with the public record and neither can be confirmed from it:
- A safety-substantiation gap. A 90%-by-weight use level, doing double duty as processing aid and primary protein source, is a materially larger safety case than a 9% scaffold-only claim — more toxicology and intake data to defend, more scrutiny of a novel use level in a novel food category. Withdrawing and refiling at a fraction of the original level is consistent with a company that could not, or chose not to, complete that larger case.
- A product-strategy change. The 9% refiling lines up with the same window Omeat rebranded as Evergreen and repositioned around “blended beef” — a minority-cultivated, majority-conventional product sold into existing meat supply chains rather than marketed as a stand-alone cultivated product. A scaffold-only ingredient fits a blend where most of the mass is conventional beef; a 90%-by-weight protein-source ingredient does not.
Both are plausible. Nothing in the FDA record, the company’s press release, or the trade coverage reviewed for this article states which one drove the decision, and this article does not claim to know. What is confirmed is only the sequence: file high, withdraw, rebrand, refile low.
The rebrand, and what “100% beef” is doing next to a scaffold ingredient
Omeat’s February 2026 press release announcing the Evergreen name and a further $6 million describes the product as “fresh, 100% beef” intended to “integrate into existing supply chains rather than replace traditional beef.” CEO Jim Miller: “Stability is our product. We’ve built the company around radical consistency.” Chief Scientific and Technology Officer Eric Schulze, a former FDA official: “We make beef for beef lovers and beef processors and we don’t compromise through plant based proteins.”
None of that language is false on its face — a blended product that is mostly conventional beef by mass, with a small cultivated-cell and scaffold-ingredient component, can reasonably be marketed as beef. But it is worth naming the gap plainly: the company’s own regulatory filing, made in the same period, describes an ingredient present at roughly 9% of the product by weight, doing a processing job rather than a nutritional one. “100% beef” and “radical consistency” are marketing claims about a blended supply product; the GRAS filing is the only public document that says what fraction of that blend the novel component actually is.
Practical consequence: treat a cultivated-protein company’s own composition language — “blended,” “hybrid,” “stability-first” — as marketing framing, not a disclosed percentage. The percentage, when it exists at all, is in the regulatory filing, not the press release.
Two separate regulatory gates, and Evergreen has only touched one
It is worth being precise about what a GRAS notice does and does not clear, because the two are frequently conflated in coverage of this sector. A GRAS notification — the pathway both GRN 1254 and GRN 1334 use — is a food-ingredient safety filing: it asks FDA to agree that a specific substance, at a specific use level, is generally recognized as safe for its intended use. It does not evaluate the cultivated-cell production process itself.
That process — cell lines, cell banking, cultivation methods, manufacturing controls for the cultivated material — goes through a separate FDA “pre-market consultation,” a process FDA describes as distinct from GRAS notification. As of the most recent FDA program page reviewed for this article, only three of these consultations have been completed since the pathway opened: UPSIDE Foods’ cultured chicken (16 November 2022), GOOD Meat’s cultured chicken (20 March 2023), and Mission Barns’ cultured pork fat (7 March 2025) — see our earlier analysis of the five FDA cultivated-meat clearances and the state bans that followed. Neither Omeat nor Evergreen appears in FDA’s public pre-market consultation materials reviewed for this piece.
Beyond FDA, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service will not even begin reviewing a grant-of-inspection application — the facility-level clearance required before a livestock cultivated-meat product can be produced under federal inspection — until the FDA pre-market consultation is complete. A cleared GRAS notice for the plasma-protein ingredient, even if GRN 1334 is eventually granted, would not by itself put Evergreen’s product on a path to sale; it would clear one ingredient in a process that, on the public record, has not yet cleared its main regulatory gate.
Practical consequence: a operator or investor evaluating Evergreen’s “regulatory review well advanced” language should ask specifically which of the two tracks — ingredient GRAS, or cell-process pre-market consultation — that describes. They are not interchangeable, and clearing one says nothing about progress on the other.
The funding figures do not agree with each other
Evergreen’s own 3 February 2026 press release states the $6 million round brings total funding to $55 million. Two trade outlets covering the same announcement — Green Queen and Food Business Middle East & Africa — both report total funding of $46 million. Protein Production Technology’s coverage matches the company’s own $55 million figure. This article uses the $55 million figure because it comes from the company’s primary press release rather than secondary reporting, but the $9 million discrepancy across otherwise-credible trade outlets covering the identical announcement is itself worth flagging: it suggests at least one outlet worked from a prior, uncorrected total (Omeat’s only previously disclosed round was a $40 million Series A reported in 2023) rather than the release’s own headline number.
The counter-argument
A narrower, more conservative GRAS ask is not necessarily a retreat — it can be the more disciplined regulatory strategy. Filing for a 90%-by-weight, dual-role use level in a novel food category invites exactly the kind of scrutiny a young company may not be resourced to sustain through a full FDA review cycle. Filing narrow, getting a scaffold-only ingredient cleared, and expanding the claimed use level later — if the data supports it — is a defensible sequencing choice, and one other companies in this sector have used. It is also consistent with a genuine strategic pivot toward a blended product that needs less of the novel ingredient rather than more, which would be normal product evolution rather than a walk-back. Nothing here should be read as an allegation that Evergreen’s current claims are false; the withdrawal-and-narrower-refiling pattern is documented, but the motive is not, and a defensible one plausibly explains it.
What we could not establish
- Why GRN 1254 was withdrawn. FDA’s notice status field states only that the withdrawal was “at the notifier’s request.” Neither Omeat nor Evergreen has, to our knowledge, published a statement explaining the decision, and none of the trade coverage reviewed addresses it.
- The exact date GRN 1334 was received. The FDA inventory page shows only a “last updated” date, most recently 8 October 2026 as re-checked for this article; the underlying notice document, which would carry a receipt date, was not publicly posted as of this article’s research.
- Whether “Omeat, Inc.” as the GRN 1334 notifier name reflects a pending corporate rename to Evergreen, or a decision to keep the regulatory-facing entity name unchanged through the rebrand. The FDA listing still uses “Omeat, Inc.”
- Current status of any FDA pre-market consultation or USDA grant-of-inspection application for Evergreen’s cultivated-cell process. Neither appears in the public FDA materials reviewed; that is an absence of evidence, not evidence that no application exists.
- The reconciliation between the $55 million and $46 million total-funding figures. We used the company’s own release; we could not confirm what the lower figure was built from.
What to watch
- Whether FDA issues a “no questions” letter on GRN 1334. A clearance at the 9% scaffold-only level would be a real, if narrow, regulatory milestone — the first confirmation of any Omeat/Evergreen ingredient claim.
- Whether Evergreen appears in FDA’s pre-market consultation inventory or in a USDA grant-of-inspection filing. Either would be the first public evidence the company has engaged the process that actually gates sale of a cultivated livestock product.
- Whether a fourth GRAS notice appears at a different use level. A pattern of filing, withdrawing and refiling is itself informative if it recurs.
Compare this to Knip’s GRAS notices, which cover a protein source at up to 10% but are sold commercially at 2–5% as a postbiotic, and to Verley’s FDA clearance for whey at 8%, which excluded the gelling protein present in its actual product — both examples of the gap between a GRAS filing’s stated use level and a company’s actual commercial formulation running the other direction. Evergreen’s case is the reverse pattern: the regulatory ask shrank rather than the commercial use exceeding it, but the underlying lesson is the same one this site keeps returning to — a GRAS notice number is a precise, checkable fact, and a company’s own description of its product is not a substitute for reading it.