Cellular agriculture is 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 for producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise be derived from traditional agriculture. This sector focuses primarily on the production of animal-derived products, including meat, milk,, honey, and eggs, obtained through cell culture. It is proposed as a sustainable alternative to livestock farming and slaughter, practices that pose significant global challenges in terms of environmental impact (e.g., of meat production), animal welfare, food security, and human health.
History
Cellular agriculture products were first commercialized in the late 20th century with insulin and rennet.
On March 24, 1990, the FDA approved a bacterium genetically engineered to produce rennet, making it the first genetically engineered product for food. Rennet is a mixture of enzymes that turns milk into curds and whey in cheese making. Traditionally, rennet is extracted from the inner lining of the fourth stomach of calves. Today, cheese making processes use rennet enzymes from genetically engineered bacteria, fungi, or yeasts because they are unadulterated, more consistent, and less expensive than animal-derived rennet.
In 2004, Jason Matheny founded New Harvest, whose mission is to "accelerate breakthroughs in cellular agriculture". New Harvest provided the first PhD funding specifically for cellular agriculture at Tufts University.
By 2014, IndieBio, a synthetic biology accelerator in San Francisco, has incubated several cellular agriculture startups, hosting Muufri (making milk from cell culture, now Perfect Day Foods), The EVERY Company (making egg whites from cell culture), Gelzen (making gelatin from bacteria and yeast, now Geltor), Afineur (making cultured coffee beans) and Pembient (making rhino horn). Muufri and The EVERY Company were both initially sponsored by New Harvest.
In 2015, Mercy for Animals created The Good Food Institute, which promotes plant-based and cellular agriculture.
Also in 2015, Isha Datar coined the term "cellular agriculture" (often shortened to "cell ag") in a New Harvest Facebook group.
On July 13, 2016, New Harvest hosted the world's first international conference on cellular agriculture in San Francisco, California. The day after the conference, New Harvest hosted the first closed-door workshop for industry, academic, and government stakeholders in cellular agriculture.
In 2022, the first European Chair of Cellular Agriculture was created at the Technical University of Munich by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marius Henkel.
Research tools Several key research tools are at the foundation of research in cellular agriculture. These include:
Cell lines A fundamental issue in the advancement of cultured meat is the availability of appropriate cellular materials. While some methods and protocols from human and mouse cell culture may be applicable, most are not. This is evidenced by the fact that established protocols for creating human and mouse embryonic stem cells have not succeeded in establishing ungulate embryonic stem cell lines.
The ideal criteria for cell lines for the purpose of cultured meat production include immortality, high proliferative ability, surface independence, serum independence, and tissue-forming ability. The specific cell types most suitable for cellular agriculture are likely to differ from species to species.
Growth media Conventional methods for growing animal tissue in culture involve the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is a blood product extracted from fetal calves. This product supplies cells with nutrients and stimulating growth factors, but is unsustainable and resource-heavy to produce, with large batch-to-batch variation. Cultured meat companies have been putting significant resources into alternative growth media.
After the creation of the cell lines, efforts to remove serum from the growth media are key to the advancement of cellular agriculture as fetal bovine serum has been the target of most criticisms of cellular agriculture and cultured meat production. It is likely that two different media formulations will be required for each cell type: a proliferation media, for growth, and a differentiation media, for maturation.
Scaling technologies As biotechnological processes are scaled, experiments start to become increasingly expensive, as bioreactors of increasing volume will have to be created. Each increase in size will require a re-optimization of various parameters such as unit operations, fluid dynamics, mass transfer, and reaction kinetics.
Scaffold materials For cells to form tissue, it is helpful for a material scaffold to be added to provide structure. Scaffolds are crucial for cells to form tissues larger than 100 μm across. An ideal scaffold must be non-toxic for the cells, edible, and allow for the flow of nutrients and oxygen. It must also be cheap and easy to produce on a large scale without the need for animals.
3D tissue systems The final phase for creating cultured meat involves bringing together all the previous pieces of research to create large (>100 μm in diameter) pieces of tissue that can be made of mass-produced cells without the need for serum, where the scaffold is suitable for cells and humans.
Applications While the majority of the discussion has been around food applications, particular cultured meat, cellular agriculture can be used to create any kind of agricultural product, including those that never involved animals to begin with, like Ginkgo Biowork's fragrances.
Meat
Cultured meat is a meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. It is a form of cellular agriculture being explored in the context of increased consumer demand for protein.
Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicines. The concept of cultured meat was introduced to wider audiences by Jason Matheny in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first nonprofit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research.
Cultured meat may have the potential to address substantial global problems of the environmental impact of meat production, animal welfare, food security and human health. Specifically, it can be thought of in the context of the mitigation of climate change.
In 2013, professor Mark Post at Maastricht University pioneered a proof-of-concept for cultured meat by creating the first hamburger patty grown directly from cells. Since then, other cultured meat prototypes have gained media attention: SuperMeat opened a farm-to-fork restaurant called "The Chicken" in Tel Aviv to test consumer reaction to its "Chicken" burger, while the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat" occurred in December 2020 at the Singapore restaurant "1880", where cultured meat manufactured by the US firm Eat Just was sold.
While most efforts in the space focus on common meats such as pork, beef, and chicken which comprise the bulk of consumption in developed countries, some new companies such as Orbillion Bio have focused on high end or unusual meats including Elk, Lamb, Bison, and the prized Wagyu strain of beef. Avant Meats has brought cultured grouper fish to market as other companies have started to pursue cultivating additional fish species and other seafood.
The production process is constantly evolving, driven by multiple companies and research institutions. The applications of cultured meat have led to ethical, health, environmental, cultural, and economic discussions. In terms of market strength, data published by the non-governmental organization Good Food Institute found that in 2021 cultivated meat companies attracted $140 million in Europe alone.
In 2020, the world's first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product was awarded by the Government of Singapore. The chicken meat was grown in a bioreactor in a fluid of amino acids, sugar, and salt. The chicken nuggets food products are ~70% lab-grown meat, while the remainder is made from mung bean proteins and other ingredients. The company pledged to strive for price parity with premium "restaurant" chicken servings.
In June 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service issued grants of inspection to UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat, the final step in a joint FDA–USDA regulatory process that allowed the first sales of cell-cultivated chicken in the United States. The FDA had previously issued "no questions" letters to UPSIDE Foods in November 2022 and to GOOD Meat in March 2023. The products were first sold at restaurants in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in July 2023.
Dairy
Perfect Day is a San Francisco-based startup that started as the New Harvest Dairy Project and was incubated by IndieBio in 2014. Perfect Day is making dairy from yeast instead of cows. The company changed its name from Muufri to Perfect Day in August 2016.
New Culture is a San Francisco-based startup that was incubated by IndieBio in 2019. New Culture makes mozzarella cheese using casein protein (dairy protein) made by microbes instead of cows.
Real Vegan Cheese based in the San Francisco Bay-area is a grass-roots, non-profit Open Science collective working out of two open community labs and was spun out of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition in 2014. Real Vegan Cheese are making cheese using casein protein (dairy protein) made by microbes instead of cows.
Formo, based in Germany, is a startup making dairy products using microbial precision fermentation. Imagindairy, based in Israel, is a startup attempting to create milk proteins from bioengineered yeast. In 2024 it had received FDA and Israeli Ministry of Health approval for its products. Remilk, based in Israel, is a startup attempting to create milk proteins from bioengineered yeast. In 2022 it received FDA approval for its products. Wilk, based in Israel, is a startup attempting to produce human mother milk ingredients using cells from breast reduction surgeries, to supplement infant formulas. NewMoo, based in Israel, is a startup attempting to create casein protein within the seeds of genetically modified plants. Real Deal Milk, based in Spain, is a startup attempting to create milk proteins from bioengineered microbes. Opalia, based in Canada, is a startup attempting to produce milk from cows' mammary cells. De Novo Foodlabs, based in Raleigh, North Carolina and Cape Town, South-Africa, is a startup producing nature-identical milk ingredients, such as lactoferrin, using precision fermentation. Cultivated Biosciences, based in Switzerland, is a startup attempting to produce fats from non-GMO yeast to make plant based milk more creamy. Naturopy, based in France, is a startup attempting to create milk proteins from bioengineered yeast. Strauss Group, a large food company in Israel, started selling CowFree - a line of vegan milk and cream cheese based on cow β-Lactoglobulin protein grown in bioengineered fungi cells, in September 2025.
Eggs
The EVERY Company is a San Francisco-based startup that started as the New Harvest Egg Project and was incubated by IndieBio in 2015. The EVERY Company is making egg whites from yeast instead of eggs.
Gelatin and Collagen
Geltor is a San Francisco-based startup that was incubated by IndieBio in 2015. Geltor is developing a proprietary protein production platform that uses bacteria and yeast to produce gelatin.
Coffee