Cultured Meat – Challenges from lab to plate

Since the world was introduced to the first lab-grown burger in 2013, the cultured meat research has grown enormously, so many cultured meat companies making waves like Moza meat Good Meat Upside food Beliver Meat Multus Biobetter progressing in sustainable meat segment. There are already almost 500 studies that grew adipocytes from agricultural species, we found differences in their experimental protocols. I found that there are still many challenges and risks which need to be addressed by these companies before we commercialize these products for mass market namely –

1. Media :

Recently I discovered that porcine fat cells take about 6 days to fully mature from stem cells, while adipocytes from other species generally develop over 10 to 12 days. Similarly, chicken fat was the easiest to produce, requiring a growth medium containing only one type of fatty acid, whereas fat from other sources needed more complex chemical cocktails to coax them towards maturation But while we need scalable and cost-effective methods compositions of biomedical-grade media for growing fat cells poses for cultivated meat products .

2. Costs :

while many companies and researchers have started to tackle this problem, we would like to see more efforts and collaborations in this aspect so that we can achieve cost parity comparable to animal meat in the next several year. We still rely on many compositions of biomedical-grade media that are too expensive to produce. In my recent visit to National University of Singapore discovered their culture meat research dept’s effort on singled out cost-effectiveness as a central and crucial factor in ensuring that cultivated fat technologies are commercially viable by developing inexpensive food-grade culture media components will be paramount for keeping lab-grown meat costs accessible to most consumers.

3. Food Safety:

Other important aspect is food safety issues as there are several stages of development for producing cultured meat and at each one different chemicals, biologics, media formulations, additives, and supplements are used. In order to food-grade and safe, these ventures need to publish analytical composition of products, key toxicology data, nutrition profiles, product stability, allergy risk, and any recorded adverse effects when consumed by animals or humans.