Dutch food technology company soft meat and Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aqua feed, have signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) announcing their commitment to develop and manufacture a low-cost cell feed supply chain. Increase production of farmed beef.
“Our partnership with Nutreco represents our commitment to further develop the cellular agriculture supply chain and drive down costs,” shared Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat.
Both organizations have been working for several years on a project called ‘Feed for Meat’, which was awarded a REACT-EU grant in 20121Applied to reduce the cost of cell feed and thus reduce the cost of meat farming.
Significant cost savings
Founded in 2016, Mosa Meat is a privately held company backed by Blue Horizon, Bell Food Group, Nutreco, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Leonardo DiCaprio, among others. A pioneer in the sector, introducing the world’s first farmed beef hamburger in 2013, Dutch Food Tech claims to have the world’s largest farmed meat campus, including a new industrial-scale production facility.
Optimizing and producing cell feed at low cost is the industry’s biggest challenge in reaching commercialization, according to Mosa Mitt. The partnership with Nutreco will allow Mosa Meat to scale its operations and offer cost-parity slaughter-free meat.
“Our scientific results are an industry first, demonstrating that food-grade ingredients perform as well as pharma-grade in cell feed. This will represent a significant cost savings as we increase production,” Bosch added.
Food-safe ingredients
Scientists at the Feed for Meat project have developed a basal media (cell feed) made with food-grade ingredients such as amino acids, minerals, vitamins and glucose that are able to fully mature beef cells (ie, embryos) without using pharma-grade ingredients. Bovine serum), a product derived from calf blood), explains Mosa meat.
Furthermore, the R&D team confirmed that 99.2% by weight of basal media was successfully replaced by food-grade ingredients in serum-free cell feed, said Mosa Meat, a milestone in the production of cultured meat with food-safe ingredients.
“At Nutreco, we innovate to produce feed ingredients more sustainably and develop feed formulations optimized to deliver the highest yields for protein producers. Through our collaboration with Mosa Meat, we have mastered an important step in creating affordable, food-safe and scalable nutritional solutions for the farmed meat industry,” said Suzanne Weigel, Head of Nutreco’s Alternative Protein Program.