New Generation Of Companies Produces Meat Without Animals And Fish Without Fishing

Meat without animals, milk without cows and fish without fishing: WUR researchers and WUR affiliated companies are working on it. They call it cellular agriculture or precision fermentation. On 28 November, the developers discussed the progress in a workshop on Wageningen Campus.

'Produce meat without animals'. That is the loosely translated slogan of the company RespectFarms, which produces animal cells in a bioreactor. 'But this is not food from the lab that we want to produce in large factories', says Ralf Becks of RespectFarms, worried about the low social appreciation of cultured meat. 'In our philosophy we work together with farmers and in the future farmers will both keep cows and produce meat in a bioreactor.'

Environmentally friendly bioreactor
Founded in 2022, RESPECTfarms grows muscle tissue in a bioreactor using cow stem cells and plant-based feed. The muscle tissue is processed into pieces of meat using a 3D printer. The company has mastered the cultivation of animal cells and is now looking for financiers and farmers who want to participate. "We would prefer a demo factory near Wageningen," says Becks, who is aiming for a facility that produces 100 tons of meat per year.

Respectfarms' cultured meat is much more environmentally friendly than conventional meat, according to research by WUR commissioned by RespectFarms. The bioreactor requires 95% less land, 78% less water, 93% less environmental pollution, 92% less greenhouse gases and 56% less social costs than the cow in the pasture. With this process, the world can meet the growing demand for meat and still achieve the climate goals, says Becks. In the coming years, the company still has to take two hurdles: the legislation for cultured meat in the EU is not yet complete and there are still questions about how production can be scaled up to reduce costs and make cultured meat competitive.

Stem cells that produce fatty acids
Not only meat can be imitated in this way, but also fish. The company Upstream Foods , founded in 2022, grows fish cells, especially fat cells, because fat provides the typical fish taste. Like Respectfarms, Upstream Foods uses stem cells; cells that have not yet been specialized and that can multiply and specialize into muscle or fat cells. The company now has forty cell lines of salmon and trout, but is still in the cell culture stage in the lab, founder Kianti Figler said during the workshop on the Wageningen campus.

Many consumers have tried meat substitutes, but they often do not like the taste of the plant-based alternative, Figler stated. The taste of fish is mainly determined by animal fats. That is why the startup is working on stem cells that can produce fatty acids in the bioreactor. She hopes to be able to start a pilot plant in a few years.

Precision fermentation
Much of cellular agriculture has not yet left the laboratory. This also applies to the production of milk proteins without cows. Wageningen researcher Etske Bijl is working on 'precision fermentation' in an NWO project, in which she produces milk proteins - caseins - from micro-organisms. The aim is to make cheese and yoghurt from this, without a cow being involved.

So far, the vegan milk has not been a great success, Bijl explains, because the vegetable proteins are difficult to replace the animal milk proteins. This is because the vegetable proteins are very small, while the caseins are very large with a cluster of protein structures that capture minerals such as calcium. As a result, Bijl's casein structures are a better substitute for cow's milk than the vegetable milk. She has already made a fake mozzarella with her proteins, but that was no more than a few milligrams of cheese. Here too, a major leap in scale is still needed.

Palm oil without palm
Cellular agriculture is still in development, but there are already companies that have taken it a step further. One example is NoPalm Ingredients , founded in 2021 to make palm oil without palm trees. The company has now succeeded in making palm oil from food waste using yeast. The process works well, says co-founder and researcher Jeroen Hugenholtz of NoPalm Ingredients, and the product can compete with conventional palm oil in terms of cost. The big question now is whether production can be scaled up to industrial level.

Hugenholtz is working on the realization of a pilot plant that can produce 100,000 liters of oil. This scale is necessary to play a role in the food chains. This requires equipment that can extract and purify the oil on a scale that has never been done before. Furthermore, there is no facility in Europe of this scale that can perform all steps of the production process. That is why Hugenholtz is now conducting tests at various locations in the Netherlands, Germany, France and England to test large-scale production. 'That is very expensive and very difficult to plan,' Hugenholtz explained during the workshop on cellular agriculture at Wageningen Campus.