Technology · Agri-food systems / Food & alt-protein
Cultivated meat
Genuine animal muscle and fat tissue grown from starter cells in bioreactors, decoupling meat from livestock while cutting the land, water and climate footprint of conventional husbandry.
1 · What it gives
Cultivated meat — also called cell-cultured or lab-grown meat — is genuine animal muscle and fat tissue grown from a small biopsy of starter cells inside bioreactors, bypassing the need to raise and slaughter livestock. By decoupling meat from the animal, the route can cut the greenhouse-gas footprint of beef by up to 90 percent and uses roughly 95 percent less land and 80 percent less water than conventional husbandry, while reaching protein densities of 20–25 grams per 100 g comparable to a lean steak. Since Singapore approved the world’s first cultivated-chicken sale in December 2020, 11 companies across Singapore, the United States, Israel, Australia and the United Kingdom have secured regulatory clearance, and the front-runner production cost has fallen from a €250,000 proof-of-concept burger in 2013 to a restaurant-price patty today — a 99.999 percent reduction. Production economics now pivot on culture-media cost and bioreactor scale, with viable unit economics projected at 10,000–50,000-litre stirred-tank capacity.
The key directions of cultivated meat are:
- Cell-line development & immortalization: isolating and engineering muscle and fat progenitor cells that divide indefinitely without animal serum, the biological foundation of every scaled process.
- Animal-free culture media: replacing fetal bovine serum with plant- or microbe-derived amino-acid, growth-factor and vitamin formulations — the single largest cost driver, now reduced up to 80-fold by front-runners such as Mosa Meat.
- Bioreactor scale-up (perfusion / stirred-tank): expanding cells from the flask to 2,000–250,000-litre vessels using perfusion and tangential-flow filtration for continuous harvest.
- Scaffold & tissue structuring: seeding cells onto edible or removable fibre scaffolds and maturing them into whole-cut, layered or structured textures that ground mince cannot reach.
Sectoral value chain#
[Biopsy & cell banking] ──> [Media formulation] ──> [Cell expansion] ──> [Differentiation]
│
(Scaffold seeding)
│
▼
[Food service & retail] <─── [Structuring & harvest] <─────┘
Value chain levels#
| Level | Description | Key inputs/outputs |
|---|---|---|
| Cell banking & seed lines | Isolating, characterising and immortalising muscle and fat progenitor lines. | In: Animal biopsy. Out: Master cell bank. |
| Media formulation | Compounding serum-free amino acids, sugars, growth factors and vitamins. | In: Nutrient raw materials. Out: Animal-free media. |
| Cell expansion | Growing biomass in stirred-tank or perfusion bioreactors from litres to thousands of litres. | In: Seed cells, media. Out: Cell biomass. |
| Differentiation & maturation | Switching progenitor cells into contractile muscle and adipose tissue. | In: Cell biomass. Out: Muscle and fat cells. |
| Structuring / scaffolding | Seeding cells on edible scaffolds or extruding them into fibres and whole cuts. | In: Differentiated cells. Out: Structured tissue. |
| Formulation & food service | Blending with plant proteins, flavouring, packaging and distributing finished meat. | In: Structured tissue. Out: Consumer meat products. |
Cross-cutting technologies of the sector:
- Animal cell culture: aseptic propagation of vertebrate muscle, fat and stem cells in controlled bioreactors outside the living animal.
- Perfusion bioreactors: continuous stirred-tank and hollow-fibre systems that refresh media and harvest biomass, enabling high cell densities at scale.
- Tissue scaffolding: edible or removable fibre, hydrogel and 3D-printed matrices that organise cells into structured, meat-like architecture.
2 · What it replaces 2 · matched by industry
| D1E– | Plant-based meat and dairy analogues and cultivated (cell-cultured) meat and seafood instead of a share of conventional meat and its antibiotic, antiparasitic and feed-chain chemical inputs Replaces: A share of conventional meat, seafood and dairy — and the antibiotics, antiparasitics, feed-crop pesticides and fertilizer of the animal … | NOVEL |
| D1E– | Precision-fermentation dairy and egg proteins (whey, casein, ovalbumin) and fungal biomass protein (mycoprotein) instead of a share of antibiotic- and land-intensive animal protein Replaces: A share of conventional dairy and meat protein — and with it the antibiotics, antiparasitics, fertilizer and pesticide inputs of the … | NOVEL |
3 · How to implement 6 steps
- 1Biopsy & cell bankingA small tissue sample is taken from a living or slaughtered food animal, and muscle and fat progenitor cells are isolated, characterised and banked as a master cell line that supplies all downstream production without further animals.
- 2Media formulationFormulation & blendingA serum-free nutrient broth of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins and growth factors is compounded from plant or microbial sources, replacing fetal bovine serum and setting both the cost and the sustainability profile of the final meat.Who can do this step matched automatically500,000 tons pilot scale“It refines sugar (including refined white sugar, golden brown sugar, fine granulated sugar and invert sugar syrup), produces bio-based chemicals/biotech outputs (alcohol, …”Volta Greentech Swedenindustrial scale“Feed additives come premixed into your regular feed with your local feed company.”Lypid Taiwan“Lypid develops PhytoFat™, a microencapsulated plant-oil fat ingredient and “animal-fat analogue” used by alternative-protein food brands to deliver richer mouthfeel and cooking …”
- 3Cell expansionFermentation & cultivationSeed cells are grown in stirred-tank or perfusion bioreactors scaled from a few litres to 2,000–250,000 litres, with continuous media refresh and tangential-flow filtration sustaining high cell densities for daily biomass harvest.Who can do this step matched automaticallyCell AgriTech Malaysia5,000 L industrial scale“We design and fabricate our own stainless-steel bioreactors, automation systems, and harvesting modules, which lower CAPEX and OPEX by more than 80% compared to pharma-grade …”Pensées South Koreapilot scale“We have developed a high-efficiency bioreactor specifically for cultured meat production and have secured safety and cost-effectiveness by developing a medium using food-grade …”Meatiply Singapore“Meatiply is a Singapore cultivated-meat company developing and producing cultivated meat cuts for Asian cuisines by multiplying livestock-derived cells in bioreactors, maturing …”ADM / Sophie's BioNutrients Singapore“Sophie's BioNutrients is a food technology company that produces sustainable, plant-based protein ingredients by fermenting microalgae in bioreactors.”RWDC Industries Singaporeindustrial scale“Using a proprietary microbial fermentation process, we produce PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), a naturally occurring biopolymer made from plant-based oils.”
- 4DifferentiationProgenitor cells are switched to maturation media that drives them to become contractile muscle fibres and lipid-rich adipose tissue, reproducing the two cell populations that define the taste, texture and nutrition of meat.
- 5Structuring & harvestDifferentiated cells are seeded onto edible fibre or hydrogel scaffolds, or extruded into aligned fibres, and matured into structured whole cuts that are then harvested and checked against food-safety specifications.
- 6Formulation & salesFormulation & blendingStructured tissue is blended with plant proteins, fats and seasonings into finished products — burgers, sausages, nuggets or whole cuts — then packaged, labelled under the applicable FDA, EFSA or MARA pathway, and distributed to restaurants and retail.Who can do this step matched automatically500,000 tons pilot scale“It refines sugar (including refined white sugar, golden brown sugar, fine granulated sugar and invert sugar syrup), produces bio-based chemicals/biotech outputs (alcohol, …”Volta Greentech Swedenindustrial scale“Feed additives come premixed into your regular feed with your local feed company.”Lypid Taiwan“Lypid develops PhytoFat™, a microencapsulated plant-oil fat ingredient and “animal-fat analogue” used by alternative-protein food brands to deliver richer mouthfeel and cooking …”
4 · Who delivers
Matched suppliers (matched automatically)
| UPSIDE Foods | United States | Producer | active |
| GOOD Meat (Eat Just) | Singapore | Producer | active |
| Joes Future Food (Nanjing) | China | Research / RTO | active |
| Aleph Farms | Israel | Producer | active |
| Meatiply | Singapore | Producer | active |
| Simple Planet | South Korea | Producer | active |
| Integriculture | Japan | Equipment | active |
| Pensées | South Korea | Producer | active |
| SeaWith | South Korea | Producer | active |
| Cell AgriTech | Malaysia | Research / RTO | active |
| Nippon Ham / Nissui | Japan | Producer | active |
| ImpacFat | Singapore | Producer | active |
In the services and supply catalogue 3 · paid service
Contract manufacturing (CMO/CDMO/toll) · Media & buffers · Upstream — fermentation & cell culture
Leading companies and institutes (from the brief)
| Company / Institute | Country | Key products / platforms | Tech features | Status 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upside Foods | 🇺🇸 USA | Whole-textured cultivated chicken | 2,000-L stirred-tank runs | commercial |
| Good Meat | 🇺🇸 USA | Cultivated chicken (US + SG retail) | 250,000-L bioreactor design | commercial |
| Mosa Meat | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Cultivated beef fat & burger | EU novel-food filing | pilot |
| Meatable | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Cultivated pork sausages | opti-ox 4-day cycle | defunct (dissolution and liquidation, 2026) |
| Ivy Farm Technologies | 🇬🇧 UK | Cultivated beef steaks | Fibre-scaffold bioreactor | pilot |
| Zhouzi Future Food | 🇨🇳 China | Cultivated pork (pilot scale) | 2,000-L pilot, 50 t/yr | pilot |
5 · Rules & route to market
Route into Russia / EAEU: NOVEL · Rospotrebnadzor / EAEU
state registration as a new type of food; no fixed term published
Information, not legal advice — confirm the procedure for your product. (2026-10-06)
state registration as a new type of food; no fixed term published
Information, not legal advice — confirm the procedure for your product. (2026-10-06)
United States
The United States is the regulated commercial beachhead of cultivated meat, where a joint FDA–USDA framework has already cleared multiple companies and the largest production plants are now commissioned.
Cultivated chicken clearance, joint FDA–USDA pathway, large-scale plants#
- Upside Foods: a Californian pioneer that holds FDA and USDA clearance for a whole-textured cultivated-chicken fillet and runs 2,000-litre production batches at its EPIC engineering centre, funded by a $400M Series C round in 2022.
- Good Meat: the cultivated-meat division of Eat Just that secured FDA safety clearance in March 2023 and the first USDA label approval in June 2023, and cut its production cost by 90 percent between 2018 and 2022 while deploying 250,000-litre bioreactor designs.
- Industry scale-up: Israel-founded, US-regulated Believer Meats became the fifth firm to receive an FDA “no questions” letter in July 2025 and commissioned a 12,000-tonne-per-year North Carolina plant, signalling the shift from restaurant tastings to industrial capacity.
European Union
Europe pairs the field’s origin science with the most rigorous approval pathway, where a wave of cost-down engineering and the first EFSA novel-food filings are now converging.
EFSA novel-food pathway, cost-down engineering, Maastricht campus#
- Mosa Meat: the Maastricht company whose co-founder Mark Post unveiled the first cultivated-beef burger in 2013, has cut its production cost by 99.999 percent and in January 2025 filed the EU’s first cultivated-beef (cultivated-fat) novel-food application; a €15M round in December 2025 lifted total funding past $156M and extended its runway to 2028.
- Meatable: the Delft-based developer whose opti-ox stem-cell technology — recognised by TIME as a best invention of 2024 — compresses the cell-cultivation cycle to four days and reached 500-litre pilot bioreactors, targeting profitable unit economics at 10,000-litre scale.
- Ivy Farm Technologies: a 2019 University of Oxford spinout producing cultivated beef on a three-tonne-per-year pilot bioreactor and partnering with Finland’s Synbio Powerlabs to scale toward 10,000-litre and 27,000-litre fermenters for first commercial sales.
China
China’s cultivated-meat programme is anchored by national-university research and tied to long-term protein-self-sufficiency and food-security goals, with a clear pathway from bench to pilot-scale production.
University spinouts, 2,000-litre pilot trials, national food-security mandate#
- Zhouzi Future Food: the Nanjing Agricultural University incubated enterprise that produced China’s first cell-cultured meat in 2019 and, in 2025, built the country’s largest pilot plant — completing the world’s first 2,000-litre bioreactor scaled trial of cultivated pork at a 50-tonne-per-year capacity.
- National research base: Nanjing Agricultural University’s national key laboratory has run the underlying programme since 2009 and hosted the 2026 Global Forum on Cultured Meat, framing cultivated meat as a strategic “new productive force” for meat-protein supply.
- Policy tailwind: protein self-sufficiency and food-security targets underpin state support, with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) defining the regulatory pathway for novel animal-cell food products.
6 · Money: tenders & grants
| Grant | Advancing bio-printing of living cells for regenerative medicine European Commission · EU | Sep 22, 2027 341 days |
| Grant | Increasing riparian and coastal areas resilience to climate change, including in waterfront cities and … European Commission · EU | Sep 21, 2027 340 days |
| Grant | Increasing the resilience of agriculture in water and nutrient-scarce environments through digital innovations European Commission · EU | Sep 23, 2027 342 days |
| Grant | Microbiome for terrestrial livestock sustainability and health within a One Health approach European Commission · EU | Sep 23, 2027 342 days |
| Grant | Optimising the water-nutrient-energy nexus for sustainable and climate smart agriculture in Africa (FNSSA) European Commission · EU | Apr 8, 2027 174 days |
Public R&D projects 25
Publicly funded research projects (US NSF, and EU, UK and other funders via OpenAIRE) whose title names this technology — matched by title, not reviewed; amounts as awarded, in the funder's currency. all funded projects →
| 2026 | Cultivated Meat by Rapid Manufacturing of Muscle-Fat-Protein Building Blocks EC · 101277827 | 232,916 EUR |
| 2025 | SBIR Phase I: Whey Protein-Based Microcarrier Platform for Next-Generation Cultivated Meat Production NSF · 2528404 | 304,997 USD |
| 2025 | 3D Bioprinting of cultivated meat: Biopolymer matrices supporting formation of muscle fibers in vitro NWO · 21927 | |
| 2024 | Utilising food waste as a feedstock for cultivated meat. UKRI · 2906648 | |
| 2024 | SBIR Phase I: Protein isolate serum replacements for low-cost cultivated meat medium NSF · 2412327 | 294,995 USD |
| 2024 | Engineering of safe and efficient animal stem cell lines for cultivated meat production UKRI · 10087894 | 236,194 GBP |
| 2024 | Development of edible hollow fibre bioreactor for cultivated meat production UKRI · 10087694 | 243,119 GBP |
| 2023 | Edible Scaffolds for Cultivated Meat Produced from Waste Derived from the Brewing Industry UKRI · 2854398 |
7 · Tech stack & innovations
Cultivated meat converges vertebrate cell biology, bioreactor engineering and tissue structuring to reproduce the texture, flavour and nutrition of conventional meat without the animal.
- Cell-line & media engineering:
- Immortalised muscle and adipose progenitor lines are selected or gene-edited to divide indefinitely, removing the need for repeated animal biopsies and fetal bovine serum.
- Serum-free media remain the dominant cost; Mosa Meat has cut growth-medium cost 80-fold since 2020 and fat-medium cost 66-fold, dragging the burger from a €250,000 proof of concept toward restaurant-price parity.
- Perfusion & large-scale bioreactors:
- Continuous perfusion with tangential-flow filtration sustains high cell densities and enables daily harvest, with Good Meat deploying 250,000-litre vessels and viable unit economics projected at 10,000–50,000-litre scale.
- Scale-up rather than bespoke biology is now the binding constraint, which is why players partner with established bioreactor builders (ABEC, GEA, Esco Aster) rather than building capacity alone.
- Scaffolding & structured whole cuts:
- Edible fibre, hydrogel and 3D-printed matrices organise differentiated cells into layered, whole-muscle architecture, closing the gap between mince and the steaks, cutlets and fillets that extruded plant protein cannot reach.
Where this appears 8 sources
Appears in 8 distinct sources across 4 regions, 2023–2026.
- directory listings 3
- policy documents 2
- reports 3
Regions: Africa · Global · Japan · New Zealand
- 2021: 0
- 2022: 0
- 2023: 33
- 2024: 33
- 2025: 0
- 2026: 22
- 2027: 0
Matched themes 4
Cultivated meat Cultivated meat technology 合成肉 細胞培養肉
Themes from forum programmes, policy documents and reports are mapped to technologies automatically and then reviewed; counts are distinct sources, not mentions, and are not a ranking. data sources and method → · Trending, not yet covered →
Sources 5 · 0 independent · 5 producer sites
Producers' own sites 5
- Upside foods producer checked 2025-07-25 · link not kept
- Mosa meat producer checked 2025-12-22 · link not kept
- Meatable producer checked 2025-05-01 · link not kept
- Ivy farm technologies producer checked 2025-05-01 · link not kept
- Zhouzi future food producer checked 2026-06-28 · link not kept