Cellular agriculture or cultured meat: What does it mean for traditional livestock?

We believe producing meat or seafood from animal cells holds great potential to address the global challenge of feeding the population sustainably – again, alongside, and not instead of animal farming. We are partnering with companies that are working on alternative proteins and have taken the first steps to grow our presence in this area through strategic investments.

Susanne Wiegel
Head of Alternative Proteins
NuFrontiers, Nutreco

New alternative protein sources such as cellular agriculture and cultured meat are still viewed with suspicion by many people. Especially those operating in the traditional agriculture and livestock sector can consider these new products as a competitive element. But those who have invested in this field do not agree with this idea. For them, these are complementary alternatives that can solve the dilemmas of traditional systems.

Nutreco, a major global player in animal nutrition solutions and aqua feeds, is one of the companies that is increasing its investments in cellular agriculture and alternative protein. The Company, an important part of the traditional agriculture and livestock sector, has advisable reasons for investing in alternative protein sources like cellular agriculture and cultured meat. Susanne Wiegel, Head of the Alternative Protein Program at Nutreco NuFrontiers which is the strategic innovation and investment department of Nutreco, has explained both their investments in the field of alternative protein and the reasons for our maganize’s readers.

Nutreco is a major global player in animal nutrition solutions and aqua feeds. However, in recent years, it has various studies and support for cellular agriculture. Can you tell us a little about your work in this field and about NuFrontiers?
We live in a world that is changing rapidly – a child born today will experience technological advances beyond our wildest dreams. At Nutreco, we’ve had the foresight to be ready – we have always invested significantly in research and development. In 2018, we created a new team, NuFrontiers, focused on supporting our purpose by investing in breakthrough innovation that opens our company up to completely new markets and businesses and helps us shift into a more sustainable direction.

Feed ingredient production accounts for 45% of greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, so we will have to find new ways to source feed ingredients. Instead of tapping precious resources such as wild fish, or farming feed crops to the detriment of natural ecosystems, we can produce feed ingredients sustainably. And we can use co-products of the food industry that would otherwise be wasted, as well as novel ingredients such as insect protein, in feed formulations optimised to meet the needs of animals. Nutreco is working to drive this forward in our industry.

While we remain fully committed to supporting animal farmers, we know that our industry will have to maximise all sources of protein to feed the growing global population and make our food production chain more resilient, so we see alternative proteins as another emerging solution in addition to traditional animal farming.

We believe producing meat or seafood from animal cells holds great potential to address the global challenge of feeding the population sustainably – again, alongside, and not instead of animal farming. We are partnering with companies that are working on alternative proteins and have taken the first steps to grow our presence in this area through strategic investments.

We are not advocating any particular lifestyle or diet. We are not moving away from our existing business of supplying the highest quality nutritional solutions to our customers in animal agriculture and aquaculture. With our expertise, passion and innovative solutions, we believe we can help all protein farmers of tomorrow to feed a growing world population sustainably.

What is the “Feed for Meat” project you are pursuing with alternative protein supplier Mosa Meat? What is the purpose of this project and what is your role here?
The ambitious objective of the “Feed for Meat” project is to develop sustainable and cost-efficient feed for producing cultivated beef. This will enable cultivated meat to be produced and marketed in an economically efficient way, so that it can be a real addition to help us secure a sustainable supply of nutritious protein for future generations. Nutreco contributes knowledge and resources on raw materials, how to process and combine them into nutritional solutions and first steps towards precision nutrition for cells – a concept that is daily practice in our feed business but needs to be developed for cultivated protein. We are grateful to the European Union who supports this work through inclusion of our project into the React EU grant scheme. Nutreco also supports Mosa Meat through building the required nutritional input supply chain, which is a natural task for us as global leader in animal nutrition but overly complex for cultivated protein startups like Mosa Meat.

You have recently made an investment in Roslin Technologies. What can you say about this investment, which is a little different from your other alternative protein investments?
With Scottish alternative protein startup Roslin Technologies, Nutreco has invested in another link of the cultivated protein supply chain. Unlike Mosa Meat and BlueNalu, our two previous investments in cultivated protein, Roslin Technologies is not a protein producer but a cell line supplier with expertise in stem cells and other cells for cultivated meat.

Cell lines are at the core of every cultivated protein production process. Only with carefully selected cells will you reach the required performance to produce cultivated meat and seafood economically and sustainably. In that context, Roslin Tech offers a critical solution relevant to Nutreco’s future “cell feed” proposition. The collaboration between Nutreco and Roslin Technologies revolves around developing media formulations and precision nutrition for cell lines. The interlink between cell lines and cell culture media can be compared to genetics and nutrition in animal production: genetics defines animal potential; nutrition drives the extent to which this potential is realised. The same linkage is crucial to deliver efficiency in cultivated meat production.

This investment offers Nutreco a pole position in combining genetics with feed leadership – amplifying our commitment to innovation, quality, and sustainability.

So what does cellular agriculture and alternative proteins mean for Nutreco? What is the target of your increasing investments in these fields in recent years?
As a science-based company, research and development is part of our DNA. We invest for the sake of learning and to identify new opportunities for solving pressing challenges in feeding a growing global population.

Our investments in alternative proteins are all about evaluating potential protein sources and relevant technologies to feed the future in a sustainable way. Through our previous investments in BlueNalu and Mosa Meat, we found that producing these cultivated proteins at scale requires a whole new supply chain, giving us an opportunity to help create a new industry from scratch. By combining Nutreco’s extensive knowledge on feed ingredients and supply chains and Roslin Technologies’ complementary skillsets on cell line development and media formulations, we can do for cell-farming businesses what we already do for animal farmers: provide inputs to the people who are growing the protein.

Cellular agriculture, alternative proteins or cultured meat developed in a more laboratory setting… How do you think all this will affect livestock farming in the future? Is this a factor of competition or factor of support?
Animal farming is here to stay, and Nutreco remains fully committed to supporting our agriculture and aquaculture customers with ingredients and technologies for sustainable animal farming and feeding. We are excited by the opportunities that additional protein production technologies like cultivated meat can offer. However, it is important to realise that the emerging cultivated protein industry must install an enormous amount of bioreactor capacity before any meaningful meat or seafood volume can come from these new production methods. This requires significant capital investments and time, especially in today’s challenging economic environment. We view alternative proteins in general as an opportunity to provide more protein to a growing population which allows expanding the overall protein production without further pushing the planetary boundaries.

Can cellular agricultural products or alternative proteins contribute to the sustainability of livestock or animal nutrition industry? For example, could such products be an alternative as an animal feed ingredient?
We need to distinguish cultivated meat, i.e. making meat through culturing real animal cells, from other alternative proteins, e.g. produced via microbial fermentation or insects. Culturing real animal cells is applicable for human food or pet food only. As cultivated meat is real meat, it is not sensible to apply it as feed ingredient for traditional animal-based meat production. In contrast, microbial fermentation or insect-based production of alternative proteins is highly relevant for creating more sustainable options for livestock or aquaculture feed. As an example, Nutreco’s aquaculture business Skretting is collaborating with eniferBio to test their low-carbon, high-protein novel raw material made through microbial fermentation. The Finnish biotech start-up was the winner of the 2020 Nutreco Feed & Food Tech Challenge. Skretting puts strong efforts into exploring alternative proteins for feed in line with their sustainability ambition of including 5-10% of novel ingredients into their feed formulations by 2025.

Anything you want to add…
At Nutreco, our message is clear: to succeed in Feeding the Future in a sustainable way we will need to produce protein from more and more varied sources – animal as well as alternatives, using fewer natural resources. And we will need a fundamental shift in how we think about the consumption, production and waste of food, at an individual, community, national and global level. We are here to support the protein producers of the world in our shared ambition of Feeding the Future.

About Susanne Wiegel
Susanne is Head of the Alternative Protein Program at Nutreco NuFrontiers, the strategic innovation and investment department of Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aquafeed. The aim of NuFrontiers is to accelerate technological change to enable ‘Feeding the Future’ and to identify, develop and invest in next-generation sustainable products, models and services throughout the feed and food protein value chain. Susanne dedicates her time to building an investment portfolio of alternative protein start-ups and scale-ups and exploring business opportunities for Nutreco as a cell feed supplier to the cultivated meat and seafood industry. Before joining Nutreco, she worked as deputy head of business development at a leading European biopharmaceutical company and in strategy consulting with McKinsey&Co. Susanne holds a PhD in biochemistry.