Now in its third year, the annual event brings together a collection of researchers, investors, founders and other cultivated meat experts to explore key topics surrounding cellular agriculture.
Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute (GFI), pointed to the increased attention on cellular agriculture from various world governments as a good sign for the growth potential of the industry.
“In 2024 we saw just so many hopeful examples from governments around the world recognizing that they see what we see, that they’re taking these scientific observations seriously and funding a transition toward alternative proteins, plant-based and cellular agriculture, and integrating them into, especially, bio-economy plans,” he said. “Every place that GFI exists, we saw governments recognizing that these scientific endeavors are worth funding, and we saw more and more scientists leaning in.”
Friedrich indicated that governmental interest is arising from the recognition of the economic incentives that cellular agriculture and alternative proteins may generate, citing findings from a needs assessment report by the Global Methane Hub and Climate Works Foundation.
“They looked across agricultural climate mitigation, so they looked at rice methane, they looked at food loss and waste, they looked at the range of agricultural interventions, they looked at alternative proteins,” he said. “They said 98% of the economic benefits and two thirds of the jobs are with plant-based and cellular agriculture, because this is the one intervention in food that analogizes to renewable energy and electric vehicles, which is to say, if you solve the science, the private sector can just take over.”
When asked to discuss the challenges in the sector, Friedrich noted that issues of scale continue to be the main hurdle for cellular agriculture, especially for bioreactors. David Kaplan, PhD, director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture, echoed the need for improved biomaterials and increased availability of inputs.
“There’s a lot of need to start to think about not just scale up for production of cells but also scale up for the biomaterial fundamentals that are going to go into all these products,” Kaplan said. “We’re seeing great growth in all protein production, cell sources we’ve used forever, optimizing the system, reducing downstream costs, et cetera … I'm very, very optimistic there.
“What I don’t see again is the innovation in what I would call nontraditional cell sources as host systems to produce all proteins, or as the cells themselves.”
Kaplan mentioned cellulose as a potential starting point for exploring biomaterial innovation. Cellulose is available in the necessary quantities and cheap enough to produce companies achieve such scale-up, but it is not presently food grade as a non-digestible polymer.
Even with challenges in scale-up and inputs, Friedrich was positive about manufacturers’ desire to solve this issue, however, due to the potential to overcome the existing inefficiencies in the meat industry.
“For 12,000 years, we've been growing crops to feed them to animals so that we can eat animals,” Friedrich said. “The most efficient animal turning crops into meat is chicken. It takes nine calories into a chicken to get one calorie back out in the form of meat. That is just shockingly inefficient.
“We can improve those metrics with cellular agriculture, it will be incredibly lucrative, and that’s why ADM, Nestle, JBS, Tyson, Cargill, they are all very interested in and investing in these technologies … they’re not wedded to the inefficiencies of the current production system. If they can make even higher margins shifting in this direction, they’re excited about that.”
