Mosa Meat signs agreement with Nutreco to reduce cost of cell feed and scale up production

Mosa Meat has signed an agreement with its partner and investor, Nutreco, to collaborate on creating a cell feed supply chain.

This is a new milestone in Mosa Meat's longstanding partnership. In October 2021, it was 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.

Optimizing 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 commercialization stage. Now, the company's 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,” commented 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 optimized to deliver the highest yields for protein producers," added Susanne Wiegel, Head of the Alternative Protein Programme at Nutreco. "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."