Today, we are pleased to share that we have signed an agreement with our partner and investor Nutreco to collaborate on creating a cell feed supply chain.

This is a new milestone in our longstanding partnership. In October 2021, we were jointly awarded a React EU grant* for the ‘Feed for Meat’ project, which strives to lower the cost of cultivated beef while creating a robust supply chain to scale up production.

Optimising the cost and components of cell feed has been widely considered a key challenge that needs to be overcome for the nascent cultivated meat industry to reach the commercialisation stage. Now, our scientists have confirmed that a basal media (cell feed) formulated with food-grade ingredients instead of pharma-grade ones performs equally well at a substantially lower cost – a critical step to further develop the cellular agriculture supply chain. Furthermore, 99.2% of the basal cell feed by weight has been successfully replaced with food-grade components.

“Our partnership with Nutreco represents our commitment to further develop the cellular agriculture supply chain and bring down costs,” shared Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat. “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.”

Key components of cell feed are amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and glucose. In recent experiments, fully matured beef cells fed with these food-grade substitutes showed similar cell density to cells fed with pharma-grade material.

“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 muscle cell count for pharma-grade versus food-grade based medium after proliferation demonstrates equivalent performance of the food-grade cell feed.

* ABOUT REACT-EU

This project is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the React-EU program. The project is called “Feed for Meat” with project partners Mosa Meat and Nutreco. The goal of the project is to develop sustainable and cost-efficient feed for producing cultured meat.

REACT-EU is short for REcovery Assistance for Cohesion and the Territories of Europe. The REACT EU programme supports investment projects that foster crisis-repair capacities and contribute to a green, digital and resilient recovery of the economy.

More information about the project “Feed for Meat” can be found on the Mosa Meat website. More information about REACT-EU can be found here.