Mosa Meat’s New Cell Feed Supply Chain Will Bring Cultivated Meat Prices Closer to Conventional

Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat has announced a partnership with its investor Nutreco to develop a cell feed supply chain.

The Letter of Intent signed with Nutreco will support the development of a cell feed supply chain that can expedite production and scalability, Mosa Meat announced. Nutreco is an expert in developing sustainable feed solutions for animal agriculture.

Food-grade cell feed

The company’s scientists say they have successfully substituted more than 99 percent of the base cell feed by weight with food-grade ingredients marking an industry milestone for cultivated meat development. According to Mosa, it’s proof that producing high-quality cultivated meat with food-grade ingredients can be done at a lower price point.

“Our partnership with Nutreco represents our commitment to further develop the cellular agriculture supply chain and bring down costs,” Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat, said in a statement. “Our scientific results are an industry first, proving that food-grade ingredients perform equivalent to pharma-grade in cell feed. This will represent a significant cost savings as we scale up production.”

“At Nutreco, we innovate to produce feed ingredients more sustainably and create feed formulations optimised to deliver the highest yields for protein producers. Through our collaboration with Mosa Meat, we mastered a crucial step in creating affordable, food-safe and scalable nutritional solutions for the cultivated meat industry,” said Susanne Wiegel, head of the Alternative Protein Programme at Nutreco. 

The announcement builds on a REACT-EU grant Mosa Meat and Nutreco received in 2021 for their collaborative Feed the Meat project aimed at reducing cultivated meat costs while also filling out the supply chain for scalability.

Reducing media costs

One of the main challenges of cultivated meat is the high cost of producing the cell feed — the nutrient-rich broth that cells are grown in. Mosa Meat says recent experiments saw fully maturing beef cells that were fed solely with food-grade substitutes — delivering similar cell density to cells fed with more costly pharma-grade material.

Mosa Meat is a pioneer in the cultivated meat category; in 2013, it unveiled the world’s first hamburger made from lab-grown meat, which cost €250,000 to produce. Since then, the company has been working on reducing the cost of producing cultivated meat to make it more affordable and accessible. In 2022, it published its technique for replacing the controversial growth medium, fetal bovine serum, in the journal Nature Food. It achieved that milestone without genetically altering cells.