Culture Medium for Cultivated Meat

Cultivated meat has attracted widespread attention as a promising technology with potential benefits in food safety, sustainable development, and traceable origin. While countries worldwide invest significantly in research on cultivated meat, a fundamental challenge lies in efficiently simulating cellular growth and enabling large-scale production in bioreactors. Despite advances in tissue engineering, achieving cost-effective and technically viable large-scale cultivated meat production remains complex. Although animal cell culture media has been refined, it lacks specific adaptations to meet the unique requirements of cultivated meat. Successful production requires food-grade media with minimal cost, regulation of large-scale cell proliferation and differentiation, the creation of an acceptable product with sensory qualities, and animal-free origin, adhering to specific regulations for food-grade media. The formulation of media with these qualities draws inspiration from conventional culture media applications and principles used in optimizing large-scale microbial fermentation processes, producing ingredients for media with lower value and at a food scale. Until now, the analysis concludes that improvements in metabolic efficiency and the development of low-cost serum-free media are still insufficient to assume the substitution of conventional meat by cultivated meat.