Upscaled production and formulation of cultivated meat

Innovationssamarbejde (Erhvervsfyrtårnet for Biosolutions)

Upscaled production and formulation of cultivated meat

This project focuses on advancing cultivated meat as a sustainable and cost-competitive alternative by developing innovative cell lines that can reduce production costs by up to 92%.

Cultivated meat is created by growing animal cells in a bioreactor setting, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional livestock farming that can produce real meat with significantly reduced environmental impact (Photo: iStock).

From conventional farming to cellular agriculture

Current cultivated meat startups rely on first-generation cell types with significant limitations in scalability and cost efficiency. These cells exhibit slow growth rates, depend on costly components such as fetal bovine serum, and cannot achieve the high cell densities necessary for large-scale production.

This prevents cultivated meat from reaching price parity with conventional meat, posing a major barrier to market adoption and the transition to sustainable protein production.

Validating ExCell cell line performance

Meat Tomorrow’s next-generation cell line, ExCell, demonstrates rapid growth, high density, and cost-efficiency needed for large-scale production, while maintaining the versatility to mature into muscle cells, fat cells, and other cell types crucial for replicating meat's complex texture and taste.

In this project, Meat Tomorrow, DTI, and RUC are collaborating to validate ExCell's performance in lab-scale bioreactors and analyze the nutritional profile of the resulting cultivated meat compared to conventional alternatives.