Jennifer Joseph 2025-01-23 05:37:23
THE RACE TO BRING CULTIVATED MEAT PRODUCTS TO MASS MARKET HINGES ON LOWERING PRODUCTION COSTS. RESOURCEFUL SCIENTISTS ARE WORKING ON A VARIETY OF METHODS TO GET THERE.
The cultivated meat industry has come a long way since Dutch scientist Mark Post debuted the first lab-grown burger in 2013. That burger cost an eye-popping $350,000 to make.
In the decade-plus since, more than 100 startups have taken the starting line in the race to bring cell-cultured meat to market at a much lower price point. And while many have succeeded in developing convincing products, production costs remain a challenging hurdle on the path to commercialization and competing with conventional animal protein.
It’s a problem that Gabor Forgacs, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Fork and Good, has faced once before: He founded the company Modern Meadow in 2011 with designs on using bioprinting to produce cultivated meat.
“We were able to come up with a yummy cultivated meat product, but it was very expensive to produce,” Forgacs says. “We were never going to be able to compete with commodity prices.”
The startup ultimately shifted its focus to bio-leather, and Forgacs took some time to assess the challenges before jumping into the cultivated meat space again.
“I definitely learned some lessons, and it was painful for me to watch other companies going through the same mistakes,” he explains. “So with Fork and Good, we had some definitive ideas on how to bring down the cost.”
WHAT DRIVES UP COSTS
The overall production process for cultivated meat is relatively simple. Animal cells are placed in bioreactors within a liquid culture medium that contains all the nutrients necessary for the cells to grow. Once they’ve grown, the cells are harvested and turned into meat products.
“There are two main cost drivers in this process: The cell culture media and the infrastructure,” says Elliot Schwartz, principal scientist, cultivated meat for the Good Food Institute.
Infrastructure costs are similar across alt-meat startups — building food-safe, sterile facilities and sourcing equipment.
Many cultivated meat companies are working to shift away from expensive pharmaceutical grade bioreactors, instead sourcing steel tanks from food manufacturers or brewers. That can reduce costs substantially, but these costs are largely immutable.
Cell culture media costs, on the other hand, are a bit more complex.
“The culture medium is a liquid that contains all those components to feed growing cells, including amino acids, sugars and growth factors,” Forgacs says. “Traditionally, culture medium has included something called fetal bovine serum (FBS). It’s a potent source of growth factors, but it’s ethically horrible because it requires slaughtering both a pregnant cow and the fetus. It is also extremely expensive.”
There’s also the added cost of sourcing the amino acids, sugar and other nutrients necessary for cellular growth.
RETHINKING CELL CULTURE MEDIA
One way companies can save money and improve the sustainability of culture media is sourcing protein material from the waste products of commodity crops, Schwartz says.
“A soy cake or rapeseed cake that is left over from oil seed processing still has a lot of protein and nutrients in it,” Schwartz explains. “You can break that down into what’s called a hydrolysate and it will provide nutrition at a low cost. It’s also a way of creating more circularity in the overall food system.”
Researchers have also found ways to replace FBS with cheaper alternatives. Yuki Hanyu, founder and CEO of cultivated meat firm IntegriCulture, notes the options can vary widely in price. The most expensive are growth factors such as PGF beta and TGF beta.
“These are super-expensive, but thanks to efforts by companies like Future Fields, which uses a fruit fly platform to produce growth factors, they are becoming much cheaper,” Hanyu says. “Insulin, insulin-like growth factor (IGF) and transferrin are more medium priced because they can be mass-produced — but they are still too expensive to be used for growing food.”
Hanyu wasn’t satisfied with the cost of growth factors available, so he set out to develop a different approach: Starting with basal medium (a mixture of the most basic nutrients needed for cell growth, including amino acids, sugar and minerals) and making serum components on the spot within the cell culture system.
“If you look at why serum components like growth factors and insulin are expensive, it’s actually the extraction and purification that takes a chunk of the cost,” he explains. “We developed a way to completely bypass the extraction and purification process.”
IntegriCulture has patented a unique two-part system that consists of a target cell bioreactor where the meat cells grow and a series of separate feeder bioreactors. The feeder bioreactors contain pancreatic, liver and kidney cells, which produce the necessary serum components just as they would in a human or animal body.
“The organ cells stay in the feeder reactor for hundreds of days, while meat cells are harvested repeatedly,” Hanyu explains. “In our pilot scale, this system produces enough cell culture for about 300 kilos (660 pounds) of meat per month.”
Another cost cutting option is altering the DNA of cells so they can grow in less expensive culture media. That’s the approach Forgacs and his partner settled on when they started Fork and Good.
“We analyzed what our cell lines were consuming, and up to 60% of the components of a generic culture medium were not used. It’s waste, and so you lose a lot of money,” Forgacs explains. “We use genetic editing to make a cell line that consumes only the things it needs, and then we adjust the feed so it contains only those components in the precise concentrations our cells need. That has allowed us to bring down the cost of the culture medium by orders of magnitude.
“When we started Modern Meadow [his previous cultivated meat company], a liter of culture medium was close to $500. Today, we’re down to about 60 cents a liter,” Forgacs says. “We project that we can bring it down to 14 cents a liter, and that’s when we can start competing with commodity prices.”
MORE WAYS TO SAVE
During the cell cultivation process, cells create two major metabolites: lactate and ammonia.
“Lactate and ammonia are toxic to cells as they build up in the culture media, so you want to get rid of them,” Schwartz says. He explains that it’s possible to use existing filtration technology to capture lactate and ammonia and recycle the media back in the cell culture process.
“The major advantage of doing this is to reuse water,” Schwartz says. “When you talk about being cost-competitive, you don’t want all this organic waste to just go down the drain, and it costs money to dispose of it.”
The captured lactate and ammonia as well the spent media, which typically still contains good sources of carbon, nitrogen and other nutrients, have potential to be upcycled or reused in a different industry. For example, some companies are exploring selling the ammonia to be used in fertilizer and the lactic acid to be use in bioplastic development.
The spent media can also be repurposed as food for microbes.
“Research has demonstrated that you can take the spent media waste from an animal cell process and feed it to microbes like bacteria, yeast or microalgae,” Schwartz says. “The microbes consuming those nutrients can be used as factories for something else, including proteins and other compounds.”
Hanyu notes that in Japan, there’s a government- funded program exploring using microalgae to produce sugar and amino acids that then fuel cultivated meat products. Japan sees it as a national food security strategy.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
The future of cultivated meat looks bright, with the industry making big strides toward cost parity with conventional meat. Schwartz imagines a future in which a cultivated meat company might co-locate its facility with a precision fermentation facility to circumvent having to transport the heavy liquid spent media.
“You could use the waste from animal cell culture to feed the microbes, have the microbes produce a product. And for a completely circular system, generally, bacteria, microalgae and yeast are high in protein and nutrients, so they could eventually be broken down into hydrolysates and fed back into the culture media.”
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MAKING MEAT ON A BUDGET
https://library.alt-meat.net/articles/making-meat-on-a-budget