We have the tools and innovation to make cultured meat: what we lack is the ability to do it at scale. That has held back the technology and made it unaffordable for commercial production. 

But now researchers have found a way to leapfrog this hurdle, upscaling the production of lab-cultured chicken, and bringing it down to the price of organic meat. 

Their success relies on a new method of culturing animal cells that allows their continuous growth, setting it apart from more laborious methods that drive up costs. Typical cultures are made by growing animal cells in bioreactors that are constantly stirred. These bioreactors are huge—about 15,000 liters each—yet cells can’t be grown at huge densities because the waste from their production accumulates too quickly, limiting production.

An alternative the researchers explore in the Nature Food study is a method called perfusion, which enables a continuous flow of a liquid medium through a membrane on which the cells are growing: this refreshes them with a constant flow of the nutrients that they need to survive, and also allows waste to be moved along and cycled through the system. Researchers can also build growth membranes in a stacked formation, increasing their surface area.

Testing out their system, the researchers found they could grow chicken meat cells at a density four times greater than in regular bioreactor systems. Without needing to halt it to clean it out, the continuously-running system produced multiple harvests over the course of the 20-day experiment. The productivity corresponded to 43% of weight per volume, meaning that for every 100 mls, 43 mls would be cultured cells. The researchers note that this was 30% more than they were able to produce in previous filtration systems they had built.

Another innovation was the use of a cell medium that doesn’t contain any animal ingredients. Usually, cultured chicken grows in a nutrient-rich serum harvested from live chicken blood: this serum is a strikingly large driver of cost in cultured meat—accounting for 40-60% of the production price. So when the researchers found a way to make an entirely animal-free medium—consisting instead of sugars called cyclodextrins and other ingredients—they knew they would be able to significantly reduce the cost. 

This tied into the final part of the research: an analysis to see how economical their invention would be in the real world. They modeled the projected production of a 50,000 liter facility (considered quite small by industry standards), and found that this could turn out over 2 million kilograms of cultured chicken each year. At that scale, and with the reduced price of inputs and quicker production, they would be able to produce cultured chicken at a cost of $6.8 per lb. That’s about the price of shop-bought organic chicken in the United States.

Cultured chicken might still be a while away from the shop shelf. But this study is a key step to getting it there. The researchers are driven to reach that goal by these meaty stats: “Cultivated meat production is estimated to use 80% less water and 35–67% less land than traditional agriculture,” they write. 

Nahmias et. al. “Empirical economic analysis shows cost-effective continuous manufacturing of cultivated chicken using animal-free medium.” Nature Food. 2024.

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