Currently production of cultivated meat is handicapped by a lack of fit-for-purpose bioreactors, expensive and inefficient growth media and general funding.
Exploring alternative bioreactors, leveraging AI and positioning alternative proteins as a solution for climate change could help address these challenges, Matt Hotze, director of science and technology, Good Food Institute (GFI), told FoodNavigator-USA during Future Food Tech Alternative Proteins in Chicago.
Improving CapEx challenges, building food-grade bioreactors
Hotze emphasized the cost prohibitive use of pharmaceutical-grade steel bioreactors to build the commercial bioreactors, rather than food-grade steel, which are currently unavailable in the market. He suggested that using food grade growth media could be one strategy to help bring down costs, with reactors being secondary to that.
Hotze added to create a market for food-grade bioreactors, the industry needs distributors and B2B players to provide these components so these materials are readily available and help significantly reduce costs.
Additionally, cultivated meat players—including suppliers, companies and academic labs—should collaborate on creating affordable serum-free media options, according to GFI’s Trends in Cultivated Meat Scale-up and Bioprocessing report.
Leveraging AI, machine learning for efficiency
Within the alternative protein space, Hotze highlighted the growing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to “find trends and information you might not be looking for.”
By analyzing vast amounts of data from bioreactors, these technologies can identify patterns, predict outcomes and make real-time adjustments, like feeding growth media at the right time or adjusting temperatures quickly, leading to increased efficiency and reduced errors, he explained.
“When you have a good data set where you are monitoring it with a good set of sensors on your bioreactors, and you are feeding that into a machine learning situation, you can find out more about what is working and what is not working in those bio processes,” he said.
He emphasized the technology’s benefits in streamlining otherwise lengthy R&D processes.
“This is the right moment in time for machine learning and AI to rise up for this industry because we are at this point where we do need this help because we need to accelerate things faster than we should normally do with startups starting and failing, or the normal experimental cycle,” he said.
Expanding public-private partnerships, investments
From a macro perspective, public-private partnerships are critical to leverage the science, technology and materials for cultivated meat’s commercial presence in the food system, Hotze explained.
He called out the Bezos Earth Fund, which launched in April its $100 million AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge, and includes alternative proteins, machine learning and AI as viable environmental technology solutions.
“What it indicates is that you have a climate funder, somebody who is primarily concerned about climate change … and they are turning their attention to food … and saying ‘Wow, there is something here, we need to put a call out and get the best minds to try to figure out what are the challenges that can be met by the conflux of … these technologies,’” he said.
