Sustainable cell culture media for cultivated meat

Background

Global food production must increase to meet population growth and dietary changes. Traditional meat production has significant environmental impacts, and cultivated meat represents a sustainable alternative.

Cell culture media are a critical factor for the economic and environmentally friendly large-scale production of cultivated meat. The project explores the use of plant-based ingredients to develop cost-effective and sustainable media.

Objectives

The main objective of the project is to develop sustainable cell culture media for cultivated meat based on Norwegian plant-based ingredients.

The sub-goals are:

• Identify, isolate, and characterise sustainable, cost-effective, and suitable Norwegian plant-based ingredients.
• Test and verify the ingredients in cell culture media and map essential nutrients.
• Confirm whether the selected ingredients for use in cell culture media work in scalable cultivation formats.
• Assess the environmental impact and estimate the economic viability of the cell culture media through life cycle analyses (LCA).

Societal and industry impact

The project will contribute to increasing the utilisation of plant-based by-products, developing and making sustainable cell culture media available for food producers, and promoting more sustainable food production by increasing the acceptance and use of plant-based cultivated meat.

Our approach

The work is divided into the following work packages:

• Identify and produce plant-based protein hydrolysates.
• Characterise bioactive phytochemicals from plant-based by-products.
• Investigate the potential of using sustainable protein hydrolysates and bioactive phytochemicals in cell culture media.
• Validate the cell culture media in scalable cultivation formats.
• Assess the production costs and environmental impact of the cell culture media.