The global food system is at a pivotal juncture, with growing populations, environmental pressures, and rising demand for sustainable, ethical protein sources converging to create both challenges and opportunities. Cultivated meat, a promising innovation, allows the production of real animal protein without the environmental burden. However, scaling cultivated meat to commercial viability while ensuring food safety and reducing environmental impact remains a key industry challenge.
In the following guest post, Illtud Dunsford, CEO and Co-Founder of Cellular Agriculture Ltd, delves deeper into these complexities, exploring the advancements, hurdles, and future prospects of cultivated meat as a transformative solution within the global food landscape.
Cellular Agriculture Ltd, in partnership with Campden BRI, has launched a ground-breaking Innovate UK-funded project to address these issues. The aim is to develop a low-carbon, low-cost pilot production system for cultivated meat to meet rigorous food safety and regulatory standards. The research aims to support manufacturers to scale with confidence. This effort focuses on a novel bioreactor design optimised for industrial food manufacturing. The project will evaluate the scalability of this technology, identify food safety risks, and assess its environmental impact compared to both conventional meat production and other cultivated meat technologies. These insights will be invaluable to manufacturers, regulators, consumers, and investors.
The Industry’s Unmet Needs
While the cultivated meat industry is rapidly growing, it still faces significant hurdles. One major challenge is scaling up production while reducing costs and maintaining product quality. Current production systems often rely on bioreactors designed for biomedical applications: expensive, inefficient, and ill-suited for large-scale food production. Moreover, these bioreactors are not optimised for producing high-quality cultivated meat ingredients at scale, which are essential for creating products that mimic the sensory and nutritional qualities of conventional meat. To truly succeed, the industry needs purpose-built bioprocess technologies that enable the efficient and cost-effective production of diverse, high-quality products.
What This Means for the Industry
To overcome these challenges, the collaboration between Cellular Agriculture Ltd and Campden BRI centres on demonstrating a novel bioreactor technology designed specifically for industrial food manufacturing. This bioreactor offers several key advantages:
- Mimic natural biology: A novel design that replicates the vascular system, allowing nutrients to gently cultivate cells without damaging cells or compromising quality.
- Precise control of cell culture conditions: Temperature, pH, oxygen, and nutrient supply are optimised for cell growth, differentiation, and maturation.
- Flexibility in cell types: The bioreactor is cell agnostic and can cultivate different cell types to cater to the need of the final product type.
- Modular and scalable design: The system is easy to operate and maintain, reducing operational costs while boosting productivity.
This bioprocess technology will play a major part in enabling manufacturers to create cultivated meat ingredients to produce products and explore their properties compared to conventional meat in terms of taste, texture, nutrition, and safety – all at a more affordable price point. It could also allow for the production of novel products that go beyond conventional meat, such as hybrid products or potentially products with enhanced functional properties.
Why This Matters Now
The timing of this initiative is crucial. As cultivated meat moves closer to commercialisation, the industry faces increasing pressure to prove its ability to deliver sustainable, safe, and affordable products at scale. This collaboration offers cultivated meat manufacturers an opportunity to access specialised production technology and industry expertise in one place.
The project aims to culminate in a fully operational semi-automated prototype system, available for manufacturers to test and evaluate at Campden BRI’s state-of-the-art facility. This hands-on experience will provide clear, practical proof of the system’s capabilities, allowing companies to see how it could integrate into their production pipelines. Most importantly, it will help food manufacturers to de-risk their scaling efforts by supporting in upskilling them in cultivated meat, considering not only the technology but also regulatory, cost, and food safety requirements that must be established in this field.
An Invitation to Innovators and Manufacturers
This project, funded by Innovate UK, brings together Cellular Agriculture Ltd and Campden BRI – two leading organisations in bioreactor design and food research. Their complementary expertise offers significant value to the cultivated meat industry, creating synergies that can accelerate progress and foster innovation.
We believe the bioprocess technology developed through this collaboration has the potential to transform the cultivated meat industry by providing a scalable, sustainable solution that addresses existing production challenges. However, this transformation cannot be achieved alone. We invite innovators and manufacturers who share our vision to join us on this journey. Whether through collaboration or by adopting our technology, together we can make cultivated meat scalable, sustainable, and a valuable part of the global food system.
