The UK’s livestock industry already uses 70% of available arable land and 27% of global freshwater, while contributing 15% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. This project aims to design a manufacturing facility that can produce cell-cultivated meat and plant-based foods at industrial scale, overcoming the prohibitive cost and risk that currently keep these products from reaching supermarket shelves. Current food production cannot meet the UN’s goal of eliminating hunger—660 million people will still go without enough food by 2050, and protein supplies will fall short of healthy diets. Traditional livestock farming also carries risks of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. Cell cultivation could produce food that is indistinguishable from conventional meat but uses far less land and water, and emits fewer greenhouse gases. If this facility design succeeds, it could slash the cost and development time for new cultivated-food products, making them affordable and widely available. The project focuses on the manufacturing infrastructure itself—the bioreactors, supply chains, and facility layouts—rather than the biology of the cells. This is applied engineering, not fundamental science, with a direct path to decarbonising meat production and reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint.
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The UN's goal of eliminating hunger will be missed by 660m people (WHO) with food production needing to increase by 50% by 2050 and projected protein provision being insufficient for healthy diets. Traditional food production cannot meet this demand, with livestock agriculture already consuming 70% of available arable land and 27% of global freshwater. It is a major contributor to climate change, contributing 15% of all global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, alongside agriculture-related pollution and eutrophication and human health risks including zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. Cell cultivated food products from plant and animal cells are accepted as a game-changing sustainable solution to these challenges, with the potential to produce products indistinguishable from conventional agricultural products through cultivation of cells using bioprocessing techniques. However, this nascent industry urgently needs solutions to enable production-at-scale to realise the enormous potential to feed more people with fewer resources, decarbonising meat production and reducing land and water usage. Key technological barriers to entry and scale for new cell cultivated products include the prohibitively long, expensive, high risk product development cycles and the huge cost of setting up and optimising equipment, manufacturing facilities and processes. Manufacturing foods of the future require facilities of the future to support their production. These facilities need to be designed with a customer, people and planet centric design in order to fulfil the expectation of reducing environmental impact from food production.
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