Wunderman Thompson Benelux, Australian cultured meat start-up Vow, Wefilm and a group of international experts collaborated for a campaign that has gone viral.
The campaign is of the world’s first meatball made from mammoth DNA has been revealed at the Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands.
The scientific experiment and creative collaboration aims to demonstrate the potential of cultured meat to revolutionise the food industry.
The Mammoth Meatball concept is more than a cutting-edge innovation – it’s a striking statement which aims to challenge the public and the meat industry to think differently about how we produce and consume food, highlighting cultured meat as a viable alternative to traditional animal agriculture.
The idea was initiated by creative disruptor Bas Korsten, chief creative officer at global creative agency Wunderman Thompson, best known for The Next Rembrandt, a 3D-printed painting that was the result of AI learning from the complete works of Rembrandt.
Using new and innovative technology, the mammoth meatball was created from the DNA of the extinct woolly mammoth and completed with fragments of African elephant DNA (a close relative to the mammoth).
Cultured meat is genuine animal meat, grown from the cells of animals – instead of the animals themselves – using innovative molecular technology.
Cultured meat can be designed to be preferable in both taste and nutritional value, and has the potential to significantly reduce the environmental impacts normally associated with traditional meat production.
The Mammoth Meatball is a unique experiment – but one that also has a very serious ambition which is to start a conversation around the future of food for a rapidly growing population – and to introduce the idea of cultured meat to a wider audience.
Korsten, initiator of the project and global chief creative officer, Wunderman Thompson, said: “In much the same way that The Next Rembrandt in 2016 harnessed cutting edge technology to produce something unexpected and groundbreaking, the Mammoth Meatball shows the world that when cutting edge technology meets creativity it can change our future.
“Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it. It’s the future.”
Amsterdam-based creative film agency Wefilm joined WT as creative partner in the project, and produced a short documentary in which the cutting-edge process is documented. Juliette Stevens directed the documentary on Wefilm’s behalf.