Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat among other names, is a form of cellular agriculture where meat is produced by culturing animal cells in vitro. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques pioneered in regenerative medicine. Jason Matheny popularized the concept in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat has the potential to address the environmental impact of meat production, animal welfare, food security and human health, in addition to its potential mitigation of climate change.
Conversations regarding the ethics of eating meat are focused on whether or not it is moral to eat non-human animals. Ultimately, this is a debate that has been ongoing for millennia, and it remains one of the most prominent topics in food ethics.
Upside Foods is a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California, aiming to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti (CEO), Nicholas Genovese (CSO), and Will Clem. Valeti was a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture.
The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs. It was created in 2016 by the nonprofit organization Mercy For Animals with Bruce Friedrich as the chief executive officer. GFI has more than 150 staff across six affiliates in the United States, India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Europe. GFI was one of Animal Charity Evaluators' four "top charities" of 2022.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Marcus Johannes "Mark" Post is a Dutch pharmacologist who is Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. On 5 August 2013, he was the first in the world to present a proof of concept for cultured meat. In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the ninth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era.
Mosa Meat is a Dutch food technology company, headquartered in Maastricht, Netherlands, creating production methods for cultured meat. It was founded in May 2016.
Cellular Agriculture Society is a lobby organization. It is an international 501(c)(3) organization based in Miami, created in 2017 to research, fund and advance cellular agriculture.
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna.
Aleph Farms is a cellular agriculture company active in the food technology space. It was co-founded in 2017 by the Israeli food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" of Strauss Group Ltd., and Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel.
Perfect Day, Inc. is a food technology startup company based in Berkeley, California, that has developed processes of creating dairy proteins, including casein and whey, by fermentation in microbiota, specifically from fungi in bioreactors, instead of extraction from bovine milk.
BioTech Foods is a Spanish biotechnology company dedicated to the development of cultured meat from the cultivation of muscle cells previously extracted from animals.
Entomoculture is the subfield of cellular agriculture which specifically deals with the production of insect tissue in vitro. It draws on principles more generally used in tissue engineering and has scientific similarities to Baculovirus Expression Vectors or soft robotics. The field has mainly been proposed because of its potential technical advantages over mammalian cells in generating cultivated meat. The name of the field was coined by Natalie Rubio at Tufts University.
Isha Datar is the executive director of New Harvest, known for her work in cellular agriculture, the production of agricultural products from cell cultures.
Vow is an Australian company that plans to grow cultured meat for commercial distribution.
Future Meat Technologies, or Future Meat for short, is a biotechnology firm which produces cultured meat from chicken cells and is working on cultured lamb kebabs and beef burgers. Based in Israel, its main office is located in Jerusalem, while its primary production facility is operating in Rehovot. Future Meat Technologies mainly seeks to supply hardware and cell lines to manufacturers of cultured meat rather than directly selling food products to consumers. In November 2022, Future Meat Technologies rebranded to Believer Meats.
MeaTech 3D Ltd., or MeaTech for short, is a company which develops 3D bioprinting technologies for usage in cellular agriculture. Based in Israel, it has a Belgian subsidiary called Peace of Meat, with which it produces cultured meat, with a focus on cultivating foie gras.
Meatable is a Dutch biotechnology company aimed at cultured meat, particularly pork.
Bene Meat Technologies a.s. (BMT) is a Czech biotechnology start-up focused on research and development of technology for the production of cultivated meat on an industrial scale. It cooperates with scientific institutions and companies in the Czech Republic and abroad. The company has its laboratories on the first floor of the Cube building in Vokovice, Prague.
