Healthy living
including dumplings, sausages and other products, for customers in the city state. This should come as no surprise though, given the favourable regulatory environment there. And while Singapore currently imports 90% of its food – each citizen consuming an average of 62kg of meat per person annually – it’s working towards so-called ‘30 by 30’ – that is, building up its agri-food industry’s capability and capacity to produce 30% of its nutritional needs locally and sustainably by 2030. Moreover, it has legislative and regulatory processes in place than can assess cultivated meat applications within 9–12 months. This contrasts sharply with the EU and UK, where cultivated meat is classified as a ‘novel food’ and regulation assessments can take anywhere from 36–60 months, according to Luining. “With long processes and unclear guidelines surrounding the assessment of applications, it’s a challenging environment for scale ups like ours,” he says. Indeed, the elephant in the room has always been how quickly the industry can be commercially scaled-up. Some have argued that laboratory-grown meat has been stuck in the experimental stage and that for it to become a commercially viable industry, tissue needs to be grown efficiently at scale. “In terms of achieving scale, what matters most is the biomass accumulation rate,” says Luining, adding: “If it takes a company six weeks to achieve great cell densities, then they won’t have achieved realistic scale. This is one of the reasons we chose iPScs (induced pluripotent stem cells).” “As they have a faster proliferation rate, they divide faster and the accumulation of kilograms of meat is also faster. We are in the process of scaling up and working to decrease the cost of the media. If the development of media becomes more mature, costs will decrease.”
Invest in the culture
In the meantime, help is at hand – the Dutch government announced in April that it would allocate €60m ($65m) to support the formation of an ecosystem around cellular agriculture. This represents the largest public funding into the cellular agriculture field ever, globally. Funding is awarded under conditions set by the country’s National Growth Fund, which aims to create structural economic growth by investing in the public domain to support innovative economic sectors. Yet it’s a long haul – investment wise – especially when measured against the size of the global meat industry, estimated at $897bn in 2021, according to Statista. Indeed, as Mosa Meat’s Mark Post is quick to point out, for example: “Despite the increase in funding for the cultivated meat industry, public support and funding has been lacking, (but) governments are
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
starting to include cellular agriculture in their policies and future plans.”
The Netherlands aside, Post cites the US, where two cellular agriculture consortia have been funded as Centers of Excellence. “However, more is required to encourage open-source research and to develop the knowledge infrastructure.”
The next level
Like Meatable, Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is part of Cellular Agriculture Europe and a member of Cellular Agriculture Netherlands. A regular publisher of findings aimed at furthering the objectives of the industry, its recent employee- led paper – regarding cell feed and single-cell sequencing (‘Single-cell analysis of bovine muscle- derived cell types for cultured meat production’) – details what’s being done and what needs to be done in this space.
“If it takes a company six weeks to achieve great cell densities, then they won’t have achieved realistic scale.”
Daan Luining
Post remains upbeat arguing his company has already achieved a number of milestones towards scaling up – including reducing the costs of its cell feed and finding food grade substitutes for the ingredients. “We’re confident the industry will be making progress on scaling up while reducing costs. In fact, we’re seeing the first evidence of scaling up with facilities currently being built,” he says, adding: “To create a quality product, Mosa Meat is
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Above: Meatable has teamed up with ESCO Aster in a deal that will enable it to produce cultivated pork for a range of products.
Opposite page: Cultivated meat is capable of disrupting the multibillion dollar meat industry.
The percentage of imported food in Singapore, which it hopes to reduce to 30% by 2030.
Meatable
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