Nutreco and Mosa Meat’s joint project “Feed for Meat” has been awarded a substantial grant by European REACT-EU’s recovery assistance program to advance cellular agriculture and cultivated beef production. 

The objective of the grant is to make cultivated beef available within the EU shortly. 

Peter Verstrate, co-founder and chief operating officer at Mosa Meat, the food technology firm which produced the first cultivated beef burger, tells FoodIngredientsFirst that the investment is allocated to reduce the costs of the base media from which the cultivated cells grow. 

“This lowering of costs will first apply to businesses in the cultivated meat industry, as cell culture media is the most expensive step of the cultivation process. 

“However, we are constantly optimizing our processes to lower cost across the value chain and this will also translate to a lower cost for consumers over time,” explains Verstrate. 

The company has already achieved “nearly 98% reduction in cost” in the case of one nutrient, he says.

The financial support to the value of US$2 million comes from the European Regional Development Fund, under the auspices of REACT-EU, for R&D to reduce costs for cell culture media, the most expensive step in processing cultivating beef.

“As we strive to feed a growing population safely and environmentally sustainably, we will need to use a variety of new and emerging protein production methods alongside traditional farming,” explains Fulco van Lede, CEO of Nutreco. 

The REACT-EU grant seeks to bring cultivated beef to the European market.The “Feed for Meat” project by Nutreco and Mosa Meat won over 60 other funding applications with their proposal to lower the costs of cultivating meat while refining the sustainability of the cellular agriculture value chain.

Growing cultured beef cells inexpensively
The “Feed for Meat” program specifically funds R&D to address the base media in which the beef cells grow. Nutreco and Mosa Meat predict that they can significantly lower the costs of these basal media by moving away from pharma-grade products and using feed and food-grade products instead.

Verstrate says production costs can be reduced by roughly 100 times when pharma-grade ingredients are replaced with food-grade components.

“Support from the government is a great contribution in bringing cultivated beef to the European market.”

Ramping up cell growth yields
Basal media is made up of the nutrients that the cells accumulate as they grow. This is comparable to humans eating proteins, minerals and vitamins. 

Verstrate elaborates: “Other compounds that our cells feed on are not accumulated, they simply need those compounds as a trigger to grow.”

“While we are currently focusing on replacing nutrients in our basal media, some of these replacements can also be made for other steps in the cultivation process,” he says.

Mosa Meat and Nutreco want to reap high yields in cell growth while keeping their environmental impact low. They intend to achieve this by using by-products from the food and feed industry and selecting ingredients with a low carbon footprint.  

Mosa Meat gets closer to commercial production of cultivated meat with each new investment. In February, the company closed a series B investment round to scale cell-cultured beef production worth US$10 million.

In 2020, the Bell Food Group invested  €5 million (US$5.6 million) in Mosa Meat’s cultivated beef endeavor. 

Nutreco brings expertise across the feed industry and raw material and ingredients procurement. For example, its aquafeed company, Skretting, is a manufacturer and supplier of aquaculture feeds and an essential link in the feed-to-food chain. 

According to a study by Life Cycle Analysis, cultivated beef production is projected to reduce climate impact by 92% and air pollution by 93%. The study purports that cultured beef production uses 95% less land and 78% less water than industrial beef production. Cultivated beef production is projected to reduce climate impact by 92% and air pollution by 93%.

The cultured meat boom?
Investment is also helping to advance technologies for cultured meat production, believed by many to be the future of meat supply. 

Meanwhile, the genesis of the cell-based protein renaissance is anticipated to play a pivotal role in transforming the global food system. However, it has been noted that industry cannot harness this opportunity effectively without the help of farmers.

Cultivated meat emissions savings are further accumulated when cultivated meat production is powered by renewable energy. For greenhouse gas compared to conventional beef production, cultivated meat’s global warming benefits are best viewed as short-term, as beef’s impacts are driven primarily by methane.

According to Innova Market Insights, although cultured meat can compete with plant-based products on environmental benefits, it will still fall short with health-conscious customers.