Cultured meat is the future, but needs promoting

_{Texst: René Didde | Illustrations: Rhonald Blommestijn}

For the past few months, a bioreactor no bigger than a pizza oven has been bubbling away in a laboratory belonging to the Bioprocess Technology chair group in Wageningen. The researchers affectionately call the machine ‘Isabella’. ‘This is where we grow meat cells,’ says research manager Affif Grazette. ‘To do that, we take biopsies from the muscles of a cow, pig or fish. We separate out the tissue using enzymes and place the isolated muscle cells in a culture medium – a mix of amino acids, water, sugars and minerals. The cells then divide and within a week we have a small lump of meat cells weighing a hundred grams.’ The chair group is working on optimizing the process in the bioreactor.

A bioreactor of the same type was also installed six months ago on the dairy farm of Corné van Leeuwen in Schipluiden, earning it the title in the media of ‘the world’s first cultured meat farm’. This project is run by the CRAFT consortium, which includes the initiator RespectFarms, Wageningen University & Research and companies such as Mosa Meat and Kipster. Grazette is involved in the project, as is the Food Quality & Design chair group. ‘Our aim with this four-year pilot on the dairy farm is to show that cultured meat can be produced on a small scale directly on a farm,’ explains Grazette. ‘The Food Quality & Design scientists are working on turning that meat into an appetising burger, sausage or meatball. Together with RespectFarms, we are investigating whether cultured meat can be part of a more diverse business model for individual farmers.’

The idea with cultured meat is that it can be a sustainable, animal-friendly way of meeting the growing demand for protein worldwide. In the Netherlands, average meat consumption has declined only slightly, from 39 kg per person in 2019 to 37 kg in 2024, despite years of government campaigns urging people to eat less meat and the increasing availability of plant-based meat substitutes. Global meat consumption is actually growing at a rate of three per cent per year.

The advantages of cultured meat over regular meat seem clear. There is no need for intensive livestock farming with soya imports from Brazil for feed, and it does not produce manure – a source of nitrogen and water pollution. Production is more efficient because no energy has to be expended growing bones or tendons – just muscle cell growth. Less land is needed and the environment benefits from the fact that the amino acids in the culture medium come not from soya but from locally grown biomass that is rich in protein, such as algae and grass. However, more energy is used directly when producing cultured meat. If that energy comes partly or entirely from fossil sources, the environmental impact can be higher than for conventional meat.

Approving for sale

Grazette expects cultured meat to play a key role in the protein transition that is being advocated. ‘We’re getting better and better at turning the clumps of meat or fat from the bioreactor into a look-alike meatball or sausage,’ he says. ‘Pâté and hamburgers are also very doable.’ Cultured meat has been approved for sale in Singapore, Israel, the United States and the UK. Grazette has tried cultured quail meat in Singapore. ‘It tasted like chicken,’ he says.

The EU has not reached that stage, although numerous start-ups have submitted applications for approval of their cultured meat products to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). But the European Parliament needs to give the go-ahead.

It is relatively easy to make a meatball, sausage or pâté, but producing a cultured steak is much more of a challenge. ‘Steaks require structured muscular tissue and veins of fat cells,’ explains Grazette. ‘To achieve that, we need a mould or matrix in which the different cells can grow. That matrix needs to be edible too, and preferably tasty.’ He expects steaks to be on the market in five to ten years’ time.

The costs are more likely to form an obstacle in launching cultured meat on the market than the technology, says Wageningen professor of Bioprocess Engineering René Wijffels. ‘The first hamburger made from cultured meat, developed by tissue culture expert Mark Post of Maastricht University in 2013, cost 250 thousand euros. Now the price has come down to 50 euros per kilogram, but that needs to be much less. Post’s start-up Mosa Meat claims they can get close to the price of a regular hamburger.’

It doesn’t help that many of the approximately 120 start-ups aimed at producing cultured meat have already gone under. They include Meatable in Leiden, which raised a lot of money initially from venture capitalists attracted by the benefits of cultured meat. But there were no fast profits to be made because it takes time to develop the technology and – in Europe at any rate – to get through the lengthy approval procedures of the food safety authorities. Another issue in the case of Meatable was that it used genetically modified stem cells, hardly a plus point in Europe.

The other well-known Dutch cultured meat start-up, Mosa Meat, has more committed investors, including Nutreco. Grazette and Wijffels are also assured of funds for now. ‘In 2022, we received sixty million euros from the then National Growth Fund for the development of cellular agriculture, such as cultured meat and precision fermentation, to speed up the transition to sustainable food production,’ says Wijffels. Wageningen, Maastricht and Delft University of Technology are collaborating in the Growth Fund consortium Cellular Agriculture in the Netherlands (CAN), which is also investigating culturing cells from salmon, squid and cod.

Wijffels praises the developments in education. ‘Ninety students are taking courses in precision fermentation, cultured meat, consumer acceptance and regulations. They can also do graduation projects in these areas and come up with process designs. Wageningen alone has ten PhD candidates researching these aspects. There is also a lot of interest in applied universities and vocational colleges. The twenty Dutch training schools for butchers will be including cultured meat in their curricula. Butchers of the future will have to deal with more processed products in their assortment and also combinations of meat and plant-based products.’

Although Wijffels does not want to criticise research aimed at creating the perfect cultured-meat steak, he thinks the breakthrough will mainly come from using cultured meat to improve plant-based meat substitutes. Wijffels once tried a cultured meat burger. ‘It was a plant-based burger where about a fifth consisted of cultured fat cells. It tasted like a normal hamburger, and very different from a veggie burger.’ The fat cells give the plant-based burgers a creamier texture, he explains. ‘That will persuade more people to eat them. Hybrid products like these are the future. Research by the Good Food Institute shows that sixty to seventy per cent of Dutch consumers would accept hybrid products. Incidentally, acceptance is lower in countries like Italy and France, from a fear amongst both consumers and producers that the traditional meat sector would suffer as a result.’

Cost to society

Cultured meat outperforms the traditional meat industry in terms of costs to society as well, show studies by Wageningen Social and Economic Research in The Hague. ‘If we compare the expected social costs of cultured meat in 2030 against those of conventional meat, the costs per kilo of cultured meat could be two to four times lower by then,’ says sustainability researcher Jonna Snoek. Her calculations assume that all farms, both conventional and cultured meat farms, have solar panels on their roofs and use a more sustainable energy mix from the grid.

Snoek specialises in the analysis of social costs, known as true cost accounting (TCA). ‘That involves factoring in social costs in the price of meat that are not currently included, such as costs associated with land use, manure, nitrogen, energy, climate impacts, animal welfare and labour conditions,’ she explains. On paper, cultured meat performs better on nearly all fronts, except in the consumption of energy and water. ‘Piped water is used in producing cultured meat whereas the cultivation of animal feed mainly relies on rainwater,’ says Snoek.

Arnout Fischer of the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour group in Wageningen sees ‘mixed feelings’ among consumers in his own research. ‘Cultured meat is a tricky concept,’ he says. ‘People associate the word “meat” with killing animals, but that isn’t what happens here. But at the same time, cultured meat can’t be associated with plant-based meat substitutes because it does contain animal tissue.’

There is another contradiction to deal with if dairy farmers start producing cultured meat. ‘Dutch consumers have this image of a farmer wearing clogs with a bucket and a pitchfork, which doesn’t really gel with cultured meat coming from a bioreactor.’

If cultured meat is to be successful in the consumer market, it will need to satisfy three important criteria, explains Fischer, who specialises in people’s relationship with food. ‘Cultured meat needs to taste good, be easy to find and be sold at an attractive price.’

In this regard, he is critical of the plant-based meat substitutes. ‘The taste may be getting better, but there is room for improvement in terms of the creaminess. Consumers still see them as quite pricey, even if there are now own-brand meat substitutes that offer good value for money. They are also displayed more prominently in the supermarket and they get included in special offers such as “second one half price”.’

In supermarkets

Cultured meat is not nearly that far. The researchers involved think it will take another five to ten years before the EU has given its approval and the meat is available in supermarket refrigerated sections. By then, the price will need to be much less than the 50 euros a kilo it currently costs to produce, agrees Fischer. That cost would mean consumers having to pay 200 euros for a kilogram of off-the-shelf cultured meat from the supermarket. ‘The cultured meat industry also needs to be able to make products with a similar fibrous structure to a nice cut of conventional meat.’

The Wageningen market researcher therefore advises cultured meat pioneers to focus on niches such as duck and goose foie gras. ‘It is relatively easy to create the soft fat with its creamy taste and texture. What is more, the conventional versions are expensive and controversial because of the animal-unfriendly production methods, where the birds are force-fed to fatten them up.’ Like Wijffels, Fischer also sees opportunities in mixing cultured fat cells with plant-based products.

While the production of cultured meat probably evokes images of an industrial setting in which bioreactors bubble away in ultra-hygienic conditions, the RespectFarms studies focus deliberately on small-scale applications such as dairy farmers who have a bioreactor alongside their herd of cows. That aligns with the aim of diversifying income sources in livestock farming. Professor Wijffels is unable to say which approach will win out: small-scale production or upscaling to large-scale production. ‘There could be room for both,’ he says. He draws a parallel with beer. ‘There is room for large multinational breweries as well as countless regional and local breweries. If farmers can combine livestock farming with cultured meat, you could see that as the comeback of the mixed farm, especially if they can turn the waste streams of arable farming into raw materials. The key is to have a viable business model for farmers.’

Dairy farmer Corné van Leeuwen is aiming for such a mixed farm model in with the world’s first cultured meat farm in Schipluiden. In a pilot project that will run for four years until 2030, he will be growing meat from the cells of his own cows.

‘We think that dairy farmers like Corné, as well as arable farmers, will be able to grow cultured meat, giving them a year-round source of revenue,’ says Ira van Eelen, one of the people behind RespectFarms. ‘They’ll be able to harvest meat from the bioreactor every week.’ Ira van Eelen is the daughter of Willem van Eelen, who was the first person to champion cultured meat back in 1948, when he was studying medicine. ‘In around 1975, we used to have discussions at home about how we would need four planets if China became a major economic power and ate as much meat as we do,’ says Van Eelen. Her father later acquired a patent on the process known back then as ‘in vitro meat’.

She thinks cultured meat is a perfectly feasible option for a farm. ‘Strict hygiene rules already apply on many livestock farms, such as poultry and pig farms. It all depends on whether we can turn it into a profitable business model. If we can, farmers will want to do it,’ she thinks.

Corné van Leeuwen already sees a bright future, as he said when his cultured meat farm was officially launched. He has a tradition to keep up as well. ‘We had the world’s first milking robot. I can see myself here soon with Europe’s first cultured meat on sale in the local supermarkets. They already sell my cheese, so why not also my cultured meat? There’s bound to be a market for it with cities such as The Hague, Rotterdam, Delft and Leiden nearby.’