Top stories in Cultivated Meat - April 2025

By your friendly food sector journalist (still not made in a bioreactor)

Sorry about the edition sent out last Friday. It was a mistake!

Imagine your next steak made at home with a desktop machine, tailored to your ideal fat level and shaped in a printer — no cow in sight. Sound like a sci-fi gadget from Star Trek? It’s not. It’s 2025, and this is real news from Osaka. Meanwhile, in Florida, cultivated meat is banned... Between biotech dreams and political nightmares, the month of April has been full of contradictions. So, let’s carve into the news (ethically and without antibiotics).

The UK made a bold move with a new parliamentary report from the POST, calling cultivated meat a tool to reduce emissions, cut antibiotic use, and align with climate targets. The tone is serious: Britain wants to lead the research, not just follow the menu. Across the globe, Japan turned heads at the Osaka-Kansai Expo. A new prototype allows people to "print" their own meat at home, tweaking fat and marbling like graphic designers of the dinner plate. The Cultured Meat Future Consortium is behind this leap, using real animal cells and bioprinting to recreate beef — Wagyu, of course. But while science excites, reality bites. A wave of political resistance — especially in the U.S. — is shaking the industry’s confidence. States like Florida and Alabama now ban cultivated meat, a symbolic stand more than a safety issue. In Germany, tech gets practical: The Cultivated B and Siemens showcased the AUXO V® bioreactor at Hannover Messe, designed to scale up cultivated meat efficiently with over 100 integrated components.

April saw a leadership change at the Good Food Institute: CEO Ilya Sheyman announced his departure, opening a key transition for one of the most visible alt-protein organizations worldwide. Meanwhile in Asia, things are moving fast. Biokraft Foods from India is getting ready to submit cultivated chicken for regulatory approval and has already presented cultivated trout. They're using 3D printing for better texture and nutrition — not bad for a startup. Japan’s IntegriCulture launched cultivated duck liver for restaurants and supermarkets, with dishes that read like a fine dining menu: lemon posset, pani puri, pear amuse-bouche. Government-backed and creatively ambitious, they’re putting food tech on the high-end shelf.

A new report from Lever VC shows costs are finally dropping across the cultivated meat sector. While numbers remain vague, the message is clear: industrial scaling is becoming real. Christie Lagally of Rebellyous Foods offered a sharp take: uncertainty may be the industry's greatest weapon. Changing the global meat industry was never going to be smooth. In Asia, companies are being told to shift marketing strategies. Consumers aren’t just driven by sustainability — taste, price, and trust matter more. After a rocky 2024, the region demands more than good intentions. Global market projections remain ambitious. According to Allied Market Research, the cultivated meat market might jump from $65 million in 2023 to over $6.5 billion by 2033. But this leap depends on economic stability — and April's warnings around trade wars and supply chain fragility (thanks to U.S. tensions) show just how fragile these predictions are. In developing markets like India, Mexico, and Vietnam, agrifoodtech investment surged in 2024, but this year may not repeat the trend. Investors fear protectionism and macroeconomic shocks.

Spain launched an “AgriFoodtech Sandbox,” a regulatory playground for innovation in food. Like similar programs in the UK and South Korea, it offers companies a safer environment to test without full approval — a smart move to keep pace with rapid biotech developments.

April brought two major advances. First, a Finnish report mapped out how the country could lead in cellular agriculture, offering a concrete action plan — not just white papers. Second, a new bioreactor design using hollow fiber arrays promises to scale up cultivated tissues without killing the cells in the process. Uniform perfusion and better muscle alignment are more than technical details — they solve key production hurdles.And for allergy sufferers, big news from Australia: cultivated seafood may drastically reduce allergic reactions. A study showed up to 1000 times less parvalbumin, the major fish allergen, in lab-grown fish. This isn’t just about ethics — it’s life-saving food.

Not everyone wants to imitate steak. Vienna-based Revo Foods says the future of plant-based isn’t imitation but innovation. Their new products focus on nutrition and convenience — not fake bacon strips. Meanwhile, Chinese startup CellX reached a milestone with GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status for its morel mushroom mycelium. They launched a snack brand using the fungi, rich in protein and iron, produced through biomass fermentation. Fungi snacking might just beat veggie burgers in the health aisle.

See you next month!

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