Mosa Meat and Nutreco have been working together to bring down the costs of cell feed, which is often regarded as one of the key challenges to scale up the production of cultivated meat.
Mosa Meat, a leader in the cultivated meat space that grows beef directly from animal cells, has signed a Letter of Intent with Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aqua feed, to collaborate on creating a cell feed supply chain.
This announcement is a new milestone in the longstanding partnership between Mosa Meat and its investor Nutreco – jointly awarded a REACT-EU grant for their ‘Feed for Meat’ project in October 2021, which strives to lower the cost of cultivated beef while creating a robust supply chain to scale up production.
Optimising 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. The LOI between Mosa Meat and Nutreco comes after scientists at the two companies 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, scientists at Mosa Meat confirmed that 99.2% of the basal media by weight has been successfully replaced by food-grade components in the serum-free cell feed.
“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 maturing 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.
