While venture capital for cultivated meat has cooled and several high-profile players in the space stumbled, the center of gravity for cellular agriculture is shifting away from startup economics and toward public-sector and institutional backing, according to experts during the 2026 Tufts Future Food Innovation Day hosted by Tufts Center for Cellular Agriculture on Jan. 8.
Venture funding and startup economics have become more difficult for the cellular ag sector, but argued that this has not slowed momentum at the institutional and government level, according to David Kaplan, Stern Family Endowed professor of engineering at Tufts University and Bruce Friedrich, president of Good Food Institute, during a fireside chat.
“The private sector has been a little tough this year,” Friedrich said, noting that “everything else has been on fire.” But he emphasized that the scientific and policy landscape is moving in the opposite direction, pointing to growing public investment globally. “We have seen over the last year government support deepening in India, Israel, Brazil, Korea, Japan, China, a bunch of countries across Europe, including in Germany.”
Friedrich framed this support as driven less by ideology than by strategic necessity. Governments, he said, are increasingly focused on “food self-sufficiency and food systems resilience,” adding that “governments care a lot about economics and their GDP,” and “making sure that their citizens are fed.”
Kaplan echoed that while some funding channels have tightened, others are expanding.
“Where one funding stream goes away, other funding streams open up,” he said, citing continued support from philanthropic organizations. “For example, the Gates Foundation is still funding work in at least related topics,” and “the Bezos Earth Fund has committed roughly $100 million over the last two years to support the establishment of three centers,” which are North Carolina State University, Imperial College London, and the National University of Singapore.
A ‘second wave’ of cellular ag companies emerges
Kaplan described the cellular agriculture sector as moving beyond its earliest commercialization attempts and into what he called a more focused second phase.
“The first wave was the big companies trying to be a complete food company,” he said, calling that approach “a really hard thing for a startup to do with the resources you can raise.”
By contrast, newer companies are increasingly specialized.
“We’renow in that second wave where the new companies … are really focused on doing one thing really, really well, and then trying to partner or bridge with others,” Kaplan said. This shift, he added, reflects a growing recognition that “you really have to get really focused and do it well, and then bring that to the ecosystem.”
Despite financial constraints, Kaplan stressed that progress continues. “Even though funding is tight, things are still moving forward, still getting commercialized.”
Messaging remains the field’s biggest weakness
Both speakers repeatedly returned to the idea that cellular agriculture has failed to clearly communicate its advantages outside scientific circles.
“If we have the right messaging,” Kaplan said, “we have the opportunity to talk about much healthier, much safer food going forward than anything we consume today.” He added bluntly, “That message never gets out there, in my estimation.”
Kaplan pointed to control as a fundamental differentiator. “When you grow food the way we’re talking about, you control the inputs, you control the output, and you control what happens in between,” he said. “There is no way you could argue that current agricultural practices can compete with that level of control.”
For example, skipping the use of antibiotics in cellular agriculture “completely differentiates yourself from the way current industrialized meat is produced,” he added.
Still, Kaplan acknowledged that scientists often struggle to communicate these points. “As a community, again, we need to figure out how to get that collective information to the general public.”
Food security as the unifying narrative
For Friedrich, food security has become the most effective – and politically durable – frame for alternative proteins.
“All of those governments are funding science,and they’re not doing it really” for climate or biodiversity, he said.… “They’re all doing it for food self sufficiency, food security, food systems resilience, just the fragility of the food system or the amount of food that they have to import.”
He argued that this framing explains why support for cellular agriculture has grown across political systems.
“These things are bipartisan,” Friedrich said, pointing to continued engagement across administrations and regions. “When you’re talking about food security, food systems resilience, economic opportunity, these things are bipartisan.”
Kaplan reinforced that food security concerns are becoming harder to ignore.
“It’s becoming more and more of a crisis for not just the US, but every country,” he said, pointing to recalls and import risks as reminders of system fragility. “We sort of position ourselves to be independent of imports that we maybe don’t have as much control over.”
