Dossier

Cellular agriculture

Cultivated meat and fish, and animal-free dairy products are rapidly becoming viable alternatives to animal-based products and could significantly reshape our future protein supply. The first tastings of cultivated meat in the Netherlands took place in 2024. Wageningen University & Research is contributing to the development of animal-free products through cellular agriculture. Why? Because it’s a way of efficiently producing healthy and safe food to feed the world in a changing climate.

What is cellular agriculture?

Cellular agriculture is a way of making animal-based products using cultivated animal, plant or microbial cells rather than animals themselves. It enables the production of things like cultivated meat, cultivated fish, animal-free leather and animal-free dairy.

How are cultivated meat and cultivated fish produced?

The meat that we normally eat consists of muscle cells and fat cells derived from animals. Cultivated meat starts with a cluster of cells from a living animal, the size of a sesame seed. To produce cultivated meat that closely resembles ‘real’ meat in terms of its flavour and texture, those cells are then cultivated in a nutrient-rich liquid so that they too turn into muscle and fat cells. As a whole, they form a piece of cultivated meat. Another option is to make a hybrid product in which cultivated animal cells, such as muscle and fat cells, are mixed with plant-based material to make things like burgers, chicken nuggets and sausages.

Read more about cultivated fish

Scientists are a bit less experienced in recreating fish than they are with meat. This is because they already have many years of experience in using cells from land-based animals such as cows and hamsters for medical purposes, so they already know much more about the nutrients required by those types of cells. Compared to that, growing fish cells is a very new process. Wageningen researchers are currently trying to make salmon cells in the lab. Cultivated fish, like cultivated meat, starts with a cluster of cells. Rather than recreating the whole fish, the researchers are focusing on the fat cells because these are what give fish its flavour. To give the piece of salmon the right texture, they’re growing the cells on an edible, plant-based mould. The mould provides the texture, and the fat cells provide the flavour.

How are animal-free dairy products made?

The production of dairy products such as animal-free milk and cow-free cheese is another branch of cellular agriculture: precision fermentation. It involves researchers modifying the DNA of micro-organisms such as yeast so that they make substances they wouldn’t naturally produce. Take cheese, for example: to make that, we need casein proteins found in milk. These provide the gel structure of dairy products. Researchers working on cellular agriculture have produced those proteins in yeast by adding a cow's casein DNA to the yeast. This process turns the yeast into a mini factory that produces the casein milk protein, which then enables the production of animal-free cheese from animal-free milk.

WUR helps the food industry to scale up precision fermentation processes. Our researchers at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research offer their expertise and facilities to optimise microbial processes.

What are the remaining technical or other challenges?

The production of cultivated meat and fish doesn’t require animals to die, but they do need to keep donating cells. In theory, if we were to replace all meat consumption in the Netherlands with cultivated meat, this would require about 1 million biopsies a year. That’s quite a lot. But there is a possible solution. Researchers have developed a way of reprogramming normal animal cells into a type of stem cells. These cells can divide indefinitely without the slow degradation of DNA that would occur in other cells.

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The process for animal-free dairy also hasn’t yet been fully optimised. Researchers are using cellular agriculture to replicate casein proteins in yeast. The shape, or 3D structure, of that protein may look slightly different from that found in cows. This could affect the taste and texture of the cheese. Wageningen researchers are currently investigating to what extent this is the case and whether there is a better way of replicating the exact shape of a cow’s casein protein.

Researchers at Wageningen and elsewhere are exploring how to make the process of cellular agriculture as sustainable and affordable as possible, and how to take the process out of the laboratory and apply it on a large scale. This includes looking at the efficient use of raw materials and energy.

Which specific aspect of cellular agriculture is WUR working on?

WUR researchers are focusing on both cultivated meat and cultivated fish, particularly beef, squid and oily fish species such as salmon. Salmon is particularly interesting because it grows very efficiently. Cows and salmon can be thought of as a kind of system for converting plant proteins into animal proteins. Individual cells in a petri dish can do this more efficiently than a whole animal can. After all, they don’t have a body to maintain. Yet some cells are even better at it than others. Salmon is one of them. Salmon cells convert almost all the plant proteins found in their nutrition into animal proteins for us to eat. For beef and pork, that figure is somewhere between 10 and 40 per cent – though that’s assuming the nutrients and environment for the cells are optimal. WUR is therefore researching the best ‘recipe’ for the nutrient substrate (or growth medium) for animal cells. Researchers previously used animal-based substances for that. They are now searching for plant-based alternatives to make the process more animal-friendly and sustainable.

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WUR is also involved in product development. We’ve set up a mini food laboratory at WUR where we make new products on a small scale. This enables us to combine our knowledge of fermentation (including precision fermentation) and cell culture to develop new, sustainable food products. Food safety in relation to cellular agriculture is obviously also an important area of concern. Our researchers are therefore investigating how we can ensure the safety of products made through cellular agriculture. Finally, Wageningen researchers are also studying social perceptions of cellular agriculture. For example, are people in the Netherlands receptive to cellular agriculture? And how are these new foods changing our idea of what it means to have a good diet? This is something that WUR is also researching, in collaboration with farmers and the general public.

Are these products already available to taste or to buy in the supermarket?

At present, cultivated meat, cultivated fish and other cellular agriculture products are not yet available in Dutch supermarkets. But the Cellular Agriculture Netherlands Foundation has already organised tastings of cultivated meat. However, these tastings can only be carried out under strict conditions and for a limited number of people, as the product does not yet have regulatory approval for sale. In Australia, the United States, Israel and Singapore, cultivated meat has already been approved and is available in restaurants, though still only on a small scale.