Cultivated meat: One year on

Revisiting the path to cost parity with conventional meat

Cultivated meat is entering a new phase. Despite a tighter funding environment, the sector is moving closer to cost parity thanks to cheaper growth media, biology validated at industrial scale, and a capital-light model built on specialized partners. In this Viewpoint, we reevaluate our 2025 work and explain how the €10/kg milestone is closer than expected.

Last year’s Arthur D. Little (ADL) Viewpoint, “Cultivated Meat: A Sustainable & Profitable Protein Revolution?” highlighted the technological advances in creating a credible path to cost parity between cultivated and conventional meat. We argued that disciplined CAPEX, modular scale-out, and second-generation biology would help bring the sector to that point.

That destination remains unchanged, but the route has become materially clearer. While the funding environment has tightened significantly, the ecosystem is not so much contracting as reorganizing around a more capital-efficient operating model. A year ago, sub-€10/kg was an aspiration. Today, it is a matter of timing rather than feasibility.

Three developments stand out:

1. An enabling ecosystem has emerged, with cheaper food-grade growth media (i.e., feedstock) approaching the €0.2/L threshold, with bioproduction offered as a service through tolling and contract facilities that remove the need for every player to build its own plant.
2. Biology has been confirmed at industrial-relevant performance, with cell densities now spanning roughly 55–100 g/L, which is closer to more mature fermentation bioprocesses.
3. The scale glass ceiling has cracked, with production demonstrated at and above the 22,000 L mark and ton-scale reached.

Together, these advances bring the sub-€10/kg milestone closer than most observers expected a year ago. They also mark a transition that mirrors how more mature biomanufacturing (e.g., fermentation and precision fermentation, in particular) became industrialized. Instead of owning every asset, biomanufacturing has shifted to building an ecosystem of specialized partners.

LAST YEAR’S POSITION

In 2025, we made three arguments:

1. The final cost of a cultivated meat product is governed by five levers: (1) cell-line performance, (2) processing, (3) final formulation, (4) production setup, and (5) growth media cost, which is the single largest expense.
2. The transition from first-generation to second-generation processes (undifferentiated cells harvested as biomass, suspension culture, protein-free food-grade media, and continuous or semi-continuous operation) opened a credible route to the sub-€10/kg goal.
3. Scale should be pursued through modular replication rather than increasingly larger vessels — a view that was the least consensual at the time. The prevailing strategies were either scale-out approaches based on multiple relatively small bioreactors (typically around 5,000 L) or scale-up approaches relying on ever-larger vessels, although the technical feasibility of very large-scale systems had yet to be demonstrated. Beyond 10,000 L bioreactors, additional volume ceases to deliver meaningful economies of scale and instead concentrates contamination and process risk.

We also developed specific open questions around three issues (see Figure 1). Media still had to move from about €0.3/L toward the €0.2/L (~US $0.22/L) target. Roughly half of the work required to reach target viable cell density in continuous processes still needed to be done. Finally, operation above 10,000 L bioreactors had not been demonstrated for cultivated meat. The past year addressed each aspect, though not always in the ways we anticipated.

ECOSYSTEM ADAPTS TO LEANER CAPITAL CLIMATE

The long-run case for cultivated meat is unchanged. The United Nations projects that feeding the global population will require roughly 50% more protein by 2050, a gap that cannot be closed by improving yields and expanding arable land alone without a material environmental cost. The Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe continues to estimate the global cultivated meat opportunity at around €510 billion (~US $570 billion) by 2050. Regulatory access has widened since 2025; Australia and New Zealand followed Singapore, the US, and Israel by clearing their first cultivated product, while Singapore added additional approvals. Clearance from local food safety administrations, however, remains granted on a product-by-product basis, not by category, so each new entrant and each new product must still be assessed individually.ECOSYSTEM ADAPTS TO LEANER CAPITAL CLIMATE

The near-term capital environment, by contrast, has tightened. Cultivated meat and seafood companies raised US $73.9 million in 2025, down from $139 million in 2024, according to GFI’s analysis of Net Zero Insights data. The active company count declined, and capital migrated toward smaller investments.

The more consequential effect of that contraction has been consolidation rather than collapse: capital, cell lines, and process know-how have become concentrated among a smaller number of platforms.

The financing question has shifted accordingly, from how to fund the construction of a dedicated plant to how to reach industrial relevance with minimal infrastructure. The build-it-all-yourself model is fading.

THE EMERGENCE OF AN ENABLING VALUE CHAIN

The most important change of the past year is not a single technology breakthrough, but the emergence of a more specialized value chain. This chain is forming on three fronts:

1. Growth media as a product. Growth media remains the largest single cost line and the most direct determinant of finished-product economics. Over the past year, food-grade, protein-free formulations have continued down the cost curve toward the €0.2/L target that a year ago ran from ~€1–€1.5/L (~US $1–$2/L). The remaining reductions increasingly arise as a function of volume commitments to media suppliers, not from further changes to the formulation. Media is also emerging as a distinct product category, with dedicated suppliers developing, optimizing, and producing it rather than individual cell culture companies working in isolation.
2. Bioproduction as a service. A year ago, every company faced the same multi-million-euro decision to build its own production capacity. Building is no longer the only option; open-access and contract facilities now allow companies to access scale-up capacity on a tolling basis so they don’t have to finance it from their own balance sheets (see Figure 2). The effect is a fixed capital barrier converted into a variable operating cost. In Europe, this option runs through dedicated open-access infrastructure, most recently for Cultivate at Scale, the Mosa Meat spin-off in Maastricht, the Netherlands. In addition, contract operators are positioned to take pilot-plant CAPEX off their clients’ roadmaps. In other example, the Asia-Pacific region implemented large-scale capacity that can be reused rather than rebuilt.
3. Reusing existing food infrastructure. The same effect appears downstream. Producers can turn cultivated biomass into a finished product by using existing food-processing and formulation capacity from plant-based and other novel foods. As a result, the cost and time to reach market are lowered.

TECHNOLOGY MATURED TO INDUSTRIAL SCALE

The value chain explains how the sector currently scales. The past year also settled two technical questions left open in 2025. Does the biology perform at industrial scale? Can production run above the size at which scale-up had previously stalled?

1. Cell density now sits in the fermentation range. Reported cell densities across leading players span roughly 55–100 g/L, placing cultivated meat bioprocesses within the performance envelope that mature fermentation has long treated as routine. Suspension adaptation, doubling time, and food-grade media compatibility have advanced alongside. Cell density is no longer the binding constraint on the process; it has become a conventional bioprocess parameter, subject to incremental improvement. Two caveats temper that conclusion: (1) reported densities vary by reactor mode and remain, in part, model-derived; and (2) the techno-economic literature identifies physical ceilings, notably CO2 inhibition, that limit achievable density in the largest vessels. Taken together, this means that the biology has been validated within known operating envelopes rather than fully resolved — a distinction that supports the case for modular capacity rather than undermining it.
2. Food-grade production above 10,000 L. Until recently, the open question asked whether cultivated meat could run above 10,000 L bioreactors on food-grade infrastructure instead of the pharmaceutical-grade infrastructure that had been the only proof of cell culture at that scale. Vow, a Sydney-based cultivated meat producer, offered the first public evidence when it introduced a 22,000 L food-grade bioreactor line, reportedly the largest food-grade cell culture bioreactor in operation to date. Paris-based PARIMA has since announced scaling its cultivated duck process onto that same line through a dedicated collaboration with Vow. Both companies have reported reaching multi-ton production. Beyond the scale itself, these announcements point to the operating model toward which the sector is converging: greater collaboration among producers and increased use of shared, existing infrastructure rather than individually financed production capacity.

SUB-€10/KG PRODUCTION COST IS CLOSER THAN EXPECTED

Lower media cost, capital-light access to capacity, higher cell density, and demonstrated scale now act on production costs at the same time. On an illustrative, industry-representative basis, a finished-product cost in the low €40s/kg (~US $45–$50/kg) in 2026 carries a credible path to roughly €10/kg (~US $11/kg) by the end of the decade, a reduction of around 75% (see Figure 3). The larger share of that reduction is driven by scale and volume, with biological performance contributing to the remainder.

The economics follow from cell density and yield. Higher viable cell density and improved downstream yield raise biomass output per harvest at constant working volume, so fewer and shorter batches are required for a given annual output. In addition, media consumption/kg declines, bringing contract-manufacturing cost/kg with it at an unchanged tolling rate. With the remaining gains weighted toward volume rather than biology, the trajectory toward sub-€10/kg now depends primarily on the rate at which production volumes increase.

STUDYING THE FERMENTATION PARALLEL

Fermentation provides the clearest reference point for the past year’s developments. Precision fermentation in particular (see Figure 4) is the closest mature analogue to cultivated meat and the subject of ADL’s recent work with GFI Europe:

• The performance levers are common to both. In precision fermentation, the unit economics of a target molecule turn on four drivers: (1) titre at harvest, (2) yield on substrate, (3) culture volume at harvest, and (4) substrate cost. A 50% improvement across all four can lower production costs by roughly 15%–50%. These four levers govern cultivated meat economics, guiding the sector along an industrialization curve that already exists rather than building one of its own.
• The industrialization pattern is common to both. Fermentation is scaled by converting idle capacity into contract and tolling capacity, choosing platforms over single products, securing anchor offtakers and shared-capital arrangements with companies, and competing on cost-in-use rather than headline price/kg. Each element has a direct equivalent in cultivated meat, and the more efficient course is to adopt the model deliberately rather than arrive at it by trial.

Case study — PARIMA

Paris-based cultivated meat company PARIMA illustrates the model described throughout this Viewpoint. It keeps its core technology and commercial relationships in-house and partners for the capital-intensive production steps in between. Upstream, it retains control of its cell lines across multiple species, its growth media and process know-how, and its regulatory expertise across markets. Downstream, it retains the finished product and commercial relationships and sells under its culinary brand, Gourmey — the name customers look for. Other asset-heavy steps are sourced through partnerships.

PARIMA’s first product is cultivated foie gras, a high-value application that commands premium prices and offers a lower-risk route to market while production costs fall. The market context reinforces the choice; conventional foie gras is restricted or banned in several countries, including the US, and avian influenza periodically curtails supply. This cultivated equivalent can serve markets that conventional production no longer reaches. On this basis, PARIMA has a line of sight toward sub-€10/kg economics with less capital and operational exposure than an integrated build would require.

A FUTURE FOR CULTIVATED MEAT

Last year, we described a sector approaching an inflection point. Evidence from the past 12 months supports that assessment. Media cost, cell-line performance, and operation at industrial scale have moved from projection toward demonstration, and a supplier base now exists to assemble capacity without each company building its own plant.

The desired outcome remains real animal protein at a fraction of the environmental cost and at parity with conventional meat. The decisive questions are no longer principally technical. They are the conversion of demand into contracted volume, the pace and breadth of regulatory approval, and the maturation of the downstream supply chain.

No capital-intensive industry has reached scale on private investment alone. The funding drought spared no one, but it cleared out the field. The weaker players are gone, and the ones still standing spend mindfully. Solar, semiconductors, and biofuels each crossed from demonstration to cost competitiveness on the back of sustained public funding, shared infrastructure, and coordinated regulation. Cultivated meat sits at the same point, and as private capital has tightened, the public role in building shared capacity has become more decisive. The Netherlands committed around €60 million in 2022 through a national program to anchor a public-private ecosystem and open-access production capacity. This action placed the country at the front of the sector in Europe and offered a model other member states can build on.

Conclusion

SUCCESS FACTORS FOR 2026 ONWARD

A year ago, we set out the actions that could bring cultivated meat to cost parity. Achieving a sub-€10/kg finished product remains the goal for its large-scale adoption. The past 12 months have changed emphasis, but not the priorities. The path forward is now clearer and rests on five imperatives:

1. Stay capital-light. Plant ownership is a last resort. Convert fixed capital into variable cost through tolling and contract capacity where possible.
2. Build on the supplier base. Buy specialized media and bioproduction as services. Draw on existing food-processing capacity for downstream.
3. Apply the lessons of fermentation. Adopt the established performance levers, platform approach, and commercial models.
4. Lead with high-value products. Enter through premium applications that command higher prices, where early volumes carry scaling costs and margins improve as production grows.
5. Treat demand and regulation as the constraint. Convert purchase commitments into contracted volume, broaden approvals market by market, and continue to lead with taste, safety, and sustainability.

By Clément Santander, Nicolas Malherbe

• By Arthur D. Little
• 10/07/2026
• Cultivated meat