Enabling affordable and sustainable cultivated meat with a first-in-class growth medium.

A new ingredient formula could cut the cost of growing meat from animal stem cells in a lab, making it as cheap as conventional meat for the first time. Industrial meat production generates greenhouse gases, consumes vast amounts of land and water, and drives antibiotic overuse and zoonotic diseases. Cultivated meat—grown from animal stem cells rather than slaughtered animals—could sidestep these problems, but the process remains prohibitively expensive. The main bottleneck is the cost of the liquid feedstock, or growth medium, that feeds the cells. This project develops and scales up new ingredients and formulations that slash that cost. If the technology succeeds, cultivated meat could reach price parity with conventional meat. The project projects that cultivated meat will capture 35% of the global meat market by 2040. That shift would reduce the environmental footprint of meat production, cut antibiotic use, and lower the risk of future pandemics emerging from livestock. For consumers, the change would be invisible—the same product, at the same price, but produced through a fundamentally different supply chain.