Cultivated meat has the potential to transform the food industry, but its path to commercialisation is hindered by one critical challenge: basal media. This vital nutrient solution, essential for growing animal cells, remains costly, limited in food-grade options and unspecialised for cultivated meat production. To unlock scalability and affordability, the industry must overcome these hurdles. Cai Linton, CEO of Multus Biotechnology, explores how basal media bottlenecks are stalling progress and how innovative solutions can pave the way.
Cultivated meat promises to revolutionise the global food system. Despite its potential, the industry faces hurdles that continue to slow its progress towards commercial viability. Basal media is one of the most critical – and often overlooked – challenges.
Basal media provides the essential nutrients needed to grow animal cells and is a significant cost driver in cultivated meat production.
However, current offerings fall short of industry needs, creating a bottleneck that impedes scalability and affordability. If the cultivated meat industry is to transition from R&D to full-scale commercialisation, addressing the shortcomings of basal media is existential.
Why basal media isn’t meeting the mark
Basal media is the foundation of cultivated meat production. It contains the vitamins, salts, amino acids, and other nutrients necessary for cell growth and differentiation.
Traditionally, it has been used in life sciences to grow animal cells for biomedical research. Because of this, basal media options currently on the market have been developed specifically for the biopharmaceutical industry, not food production.
This creates three challenges:
1.The lack of food-grade options
Most basal media formulations are designed to meet stringent standards for biomedical research applications and are thus unsuitable for food-grade cultivated meat production.
For cultivated meat to reach consumers, these products must be entirely made up of food-grade ingredients and made to food-safe manufacturing standards.
Unfortunately, the current market options don’t meet these requirements, forcing cultivated meat companies to buy non-food-grade media and reformulate during the scale-up phase – a costly and time-consuming process.
2.High costs
Traditional basal media is prohibitively expensive. Academic research, often backed by large funding bodies and grants, can absorb these costs during small-scale R&D. However, these costs become untenable for businesses transitioning to commercial production.
Unlike academic labs, early-stage cultivated meat companies must navigate financial pressures without the same funding support, making cost-efficient solutions essential for commercial scaling.
Though serum is the most expensive component of a complete media formulation, basal media costs are still too high for large-scale production. For example, a standard liquid DMEM-F12 basal media formulation costs approximately $50/L without the addition of a serum replacement.
To achieve commercial viability, the total cost of complete media must fall below $1/L, most of which comes from the serum replacement, not the basal media. In reality, the cost of basal media should be as close to zero as possible.
Despite this, early-stage cultivated meat companies are forced to overpay for standard basal media as they have no alternative, driving up production costs and delaying the industry’s progress towards price parity.
Without a clear path towards cost competitiveness, attracting investors who see cultivated meat as a viable alternative becomes increasingly difficult – further slowing the industry’s path to mainstream adoption.
3.Limited specialisation
Most basal media formulations available today are generic, designed to support a wide range of cell types rather than optimising growth for specific applications. Take DMEM F12, the most widely used basal medium formulation, first developed in the 1950s. It contains several ingredients in excess, adding complexity and cost.
At the same time, DMEM F12 is deficient in other ingredients that directly improve growth rates and viability for cultivated meat cells. While the flexibility of generic formulations is helpful in research settings, it presents a challenge for commercial-scale production where tailored formulations are necessary.
For cultivated meat companies, using generic basal media means compromising on cost and performance. This leads to lower productivity and limited cell functionality.
Take cultivated beef as an example – bovine muscle cells have specific metabolic and nutritional requirements that differ from those of porcine cells. Without specialised basal media formulations, cultivated meat companies will struggle to optimise their products, leading to wasted resources and extended development timelines.
Without a supply chain that can produce specialised, reliable basal media solutions, cultivated meat risks remaining a niche innovation rather than a mainstream food revolution.
The path to commercial-ready cultivated meat
Addressing the basal media bottleneck is about more than just improving one component of the production process; it’s about enabling the entire industry to move forward. The existing supply chain for cultivated meat companies was built to facilitate life sciences research and development.
There is a clear need to create a supply chain specifically for cultivated meat companies that can provide affordable, food-grade ingredients. This starts with food-grade basal media.
Optimising the primary input into cultivated meat will allow companies to begin focusing on innovation rather than formulation. It will reduce the time and cost of bringing products to market and help drive us towards market parity – making cultivated meat accessible to consumers.
