Cultured animal products, also known as cultivated or “cell-based” meat, involve a form of cellular agriculture in which “whole cut” meat, poultry, or seafood is produced in vitro. This is accomplished by culturing muscle, fat, and connective tissue cells taken from a healthy living animal to create a product that is molecularly identical to that of conventional meat, poultry, or seafood.
The extracted cells are taken from live animals and grown further in bioreactors where a nutrient-rich cell culture medium is used to support growth. Next, the cells are harvested and processed with binding agents and scaffolding to form aggregates that can be formed into a final product, such as a cutlet, a minced meat patty, steak, chicken nuggets, or even sushi.
The scaffolding is usually made up of vegetable cellulose but some technologists in the field have been experimenting with using bone cells to create a natural bone scaffold. True bone scaffolding, however, is still in the early stages of development.
A Better Bite
Cultured meat and poultry products from UPSIDE Foods, Inc. and Eat Just, Inc.’s GOOD Meat brand were approved for sale by the FDA and USDA in 2023. However, scalability, high production costs, and conflicting laws and regulations on the state level have been tough hurdles, holding back widespread sales and distribution.
While chicken and beef are the primary targets for culturing, some companies are zeroing in on pork and last year, the Australian company Vow Group Pty, Ltd. received approval for its cell-based quail. The company also is working with water buffalo, kangaroo, alpaca, and several dozen other unconventional species.
Another challenge for cell-derived meat is that consumer adoption is slow. This is due not only to availability but to low awareness and confusing media messages. But these are temporary conditions; the cultured meat market growth is gradually gaining ground as consumer demand for sustainable and ethical food solutions continues to rise.
Conventional meat is a compete protein source as it contains all 20 amino acids. Cell-cultured meat is potentially nutritionally similar to conventional meat for having identical amino-acid content. Moreover, it also has the potential to be customized to be more healthful by adjusting the growth medium to include beneficial nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, specific vitamins and minerals, or to reduce saturated fat.
Being cultured in a controlled and sterile environment can offer other advantages. These include reducing or avoiding antibiotic use and a lowering or eliminating the risk of zoonotic diseases. There are still questions about potential contamination risks and the long-term effects of production additives.
Nurturing Growth
There is a list of nutrients used in cell-cultured meat including glucose, amino acids including L-glutamine (which provides nitrogen and carbon for cell growth), B vitamins, and growth factors. The growth factors are specialized signaling proteins or hormones that trigger cell proliferation and differentiation into muscle and fat. Phenol red is also used as a pH indicator as it will change the solution color to yellow under acidic conditions (pH below 6.8), which will occur as metabolic waste products lower the pH level.
Many of the nutrients are typically purchased as a powdered blend that must be reconstituted with sterile water to create a liquid medium. Sodium bicarbonate can be used to adjust the pH, and the final solution is sterilized by filtration. The specific combination of nutrients is optimized for cell type and final product requirements.
Currently, some 150 companies worldwide are operating in the cultured meat space. Singapore has been one of the leaders in the cultured meat industry since 2020, becoming the first country to approve cultured chicken bites for public sale. Israel, too, has been making strident leaps in the technology of cultured animal products.
For example, Aleph Farms, Ltd. developed a cultivated steak product “Aleph Cuts,” available through select restaurants following regulatory approval in each market. Israel was the first market where the company received regulatory approval, and plans are to expand to additional regions as approvals are granted.
Something Fishy This Way Comes
Seafood culturing has held great promise due to the more uniform muscle structure of fish. One leading pioneer, BlueNalu, Inc., is heading into its final stages toward production, working through regulatory approval and commercialization. The company plans to release its first product, cultivated bluefin tuna toro by 2027.
Toro is the fatty meat of the Pacific bluefin tuna served as sushi or sashimi, usually cut from the belly or outer layers. High quality toro is prized for its rich umami flavor and its “melt-in-your-mouth” texture. Recently, BlueNalu gained membership into the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), the leading trade association representing the US seafood industry.
“Our cultivated bluefin tuna toro, represents an extraordinary opportunity to offer one of the most desired and most challenged seafood species through a more secure and predictable supply chain,” says Lou Cooperhouse, BlueNalu’s CEO. “We’re working closely with regulators and partners around the world to bring this product to market, and we see tremendous potential for cultivated seafood to complement the traditional seafood industry in regions like Japan, the US, and beyond.”
The technique is being tested on other types of seafood and, considering the devastating planetwide decline of marine species, with many on the brink of extinction, terming this technology as world-saving might not be seen as an exaggeration.
Meaty Breakthroughs
One of the biggest hold-ups in cultured meat production has been scalability. The time and cost involved in making even small amounts of product has thus far been prohibitive. Only around two years ago, an Israeli food technology company—Ever After Foods, Ltd. (a subsidiary of Pluri Biotech, Ltd.)—made a major breakthrough in solving this bottleneck. The company overcame the barrier of scale-up in cell-based meat production by “shifting the paradigm.”
According to Ever After CEO Eyal Rosenthal, the greatest challenge has been that animal protein makers have been relying on the same technology of large steel bioreactors. These use mixers and stirrers that generate high mechanical stress, disrupting the animal cells and tissues. The result is unstructured slurries that need further manipulation instead of building actual whole-muscle meat.
Ever After developed a system of cultivation that can produce a high volume, so-far comparatively low-cost product. The company’s system is designed to grow the animal stem cells into whole muscle tissues that doesn’t stress the cells. They’re nurtured in a medium that is shielded from stress and provides all the nutrients—vitamins, minerals, amino acids, sugar, and salts—along edible scaffolds.
Another Israeli company is moving both cultivated meat technology and space exploration forward. In 2019, Aleph Farms made history by producing the first cultivated meat in space. Together with 3D Bioprinting Solutions, the company conducted a successful first experiment on the International Space Station where cultivated meat tissue was assembled using 3D bioprinting technology.
Such technological advances will allow for the development of next-generation products to feed hungry astronauts. As production methods are streamlined and costs continue to decline, both quality and quantity will improve to the point of parity with conventional animal protein. The question then will not be one of if cultivated meat, poultry, and seafood will make it to market but how soon.
Watch the Prepared Foods interview with Ever After Foods, Ltd. CEO Eyal Rosenthal, or listen to the audio version.
A Growing Market for Cultured Meat
A recent report by Precedence Research Pvt. Ltd. valued the US cultured meat market at USD569 million in 2024, and is projecting it to surpass USD10 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of more than 5%.
