Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci.

ISSN 0077-8923

A N N A L S O F T H E N E W Y O R K A C A D E M Y O F SC I E N C E S
Issue: Frontiers in Agricultural Sustainability

An alternative animal protein source: cultured beef

Mark J. Post
Department of Physiology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands

Address for correspondence: Mark J. Post, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Physiology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel
50, 6229 ER Maastricht, the Netherlands. m.post@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Alternative sources of animal proteins are needed that can be produced efficiently, thereby providing food security with
diminished ecological burden. It is feasible to culture beef from bovine skeletal muscle stem cells, but the technology
is still under development. The aim is to create a beef mimic with equivalent taste, texture, and appearance and
with the same nutritional value as livestock-produced beef. More specifically, there is a need for optimization of
protein content and fat content. In addition, scalability of production requires modification of current small-scale
bioreactors to the largest possible scale. The necessary steps and current progress suggest that this aim is achievable,
but formal evidence is still required. Similarly, we can be optimistic about consumer acceptance based on initial
data, but detailed studies are needed to gain more insight into potential psychological obstacles that could lead to
rejection. These challenges are formidable but likely surmountable. The severity of upcoming food-security threats
warrants serious research and development efforts to address the challenges that come with bringing cultured beef
to the market.

Keywords: cultured beef; food security; stem cell; skeletal muscle

rigorous restraint in meat consumption, but success

Introduction
As a result of projected population growth and in-
creases in welfare, meat demand is expected to in-
crease by 73% by 2050, while production of meat
through livestock may remain stagnant.1 Livestock
production of beef is particularly inefficient, as cat-
tle reach a conversion rate of feed to animal proteins
of approximately 15%. Pigs may reach a conversion
rate of 30% and chickens reach even higher rates.
Livestock consume a large part of our natural food
resources that we could use to directly feed humans
and which could potentially eliminate food short-
ages at a global scale. In addition, livestock con-
tribute appreciably to greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-
sion, in particular methane emitted by ruminants.
It is estimated that livestock farming contributes
up to 15% of total GHG emission. The numbers
are alarming, but also provide the opportunity to
improve the current production system and revert
some of the negative outcomes of beef production.2
Alternatively, we could strive for a global reduc-
tion in meat demand by promoting vegetarianism or
is unlikely given the steady small size of the vegetar-
ian population in industrialized meat-eating coun-
tries. Also, meat analogues from vegetable protein
sources, thus far, fail to capture a substantial mar-
ket share beyond the traditional vegetarian target
population.
The development of cultured beef from
bovine skeletal muscle stem cells through tissue-
engineering techniques is potentially a resource-
efficient way to grow meat. Proof of concept was
provided in 2013 by our lab, yet it is fair to say that
the technology is still in its infancy and that some
obstacles need to be cleared before it can reach its
full potential.
For cultured beef to become a viable alternative
to livestock beef, its production needs to be resource
efficient, sustainable, scalable, and lead to a product
that is indistinguishable from current beef. In ad-
dition, consumers need to accept cultured beef as a
worthy and ultimately preferable equivalent of the
traditional product. These challenges are formidable
but likely surmountable. The severity of upcoming

doi: 10.1111/nyas.12569
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1328 (2014) 29–33 
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences. 29
Cultured beef
food security threats warrants serious research and
development efforts to address the challenges that
come with bringing cultured beef to the market.
Efficiency of cultured beef
The stem cell technology to produce cultured beef
requires four steps (Fig. 1): (1) harvesting of stem
cells, (2) expansion of stem cell numbers, (3) differ-
entiation of stem cells into skeletal muscle cells and
fibers, and (4) assembly into the final meat product.
Skeletal muscle–specific stem cells, so-called
satellite cells, are harvested from a small piece of
bovine muscle tissue (e.g., taken through a biopsy
needle). A needle biopsy is a harmless and small
procedure that requires little resources, other than
some labor. The subsequent mechanical and en-
zymatic digestion steps to isolate the satellite cells
also mainly cost labor and very little material or
energy.
Expansion of cells, on the other hand, requires
feed in the form of cell culture medium, a fluid that
contains glucose, amino acids, minerals, vitamins,
and buffers. The amino acids are typically produced
by bacterial fermentation, and a large percentage of
amino acid production is already used to supple-
ment feed for livestock. Energy sources such as glu-
cose are typically of plant origin and easy to extract
and purify. Vitamins are synthetized or extracted
from plants. During differentiation and tissue gen-
eration, the cell density is higher and, consequently,
less cell culture medium is used.
The economic outcome for cell expansion in
terms of spent material resources heavily depends
on the specific methods used to scale the produc-
tion process. Estimates at this stage are tentative
at best, as no particular process has been designed
and tested yet. The current outlook, however, is that
cells will be grown on microcarriers in large (e.g.,
25,000 L) fermentation incubators at a maximum
cell density of 5 × 107 cells/mL. With an estimated
5 × 1010 cells per kg of meat and 15 medium changes
during the expansion cycle, 45 L of medium is
needed to produce 1 kg of meat or roughly 200 g
of protein. Nutrient (amino acids, glucose) content
of medium is 5 g/L, so 225 g of nutrients are used
to produce 200 g of beef protein. In contrast, for
livestock beef with a feed conversion ratio of 7, one
needs 1.33 kg of protein (7 kg of grain with 19%
protein) to produce the same 200 g of protein. The
differentiation phase would require another 20 L of
30 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1328 (2014) 29–33 
Post
medium. The proliferation phase requires the largest
amount of medium: 80% of the total medium used
for culturing beef. This technology would still pro-
duce a sixfold higher efficiency (225 g instead of
1.33 kg for 200 g beef protein). Some of that gain in
efficiency will be lost again with the production of
purified amino acids that are palatable for cells in
culture. Although the resources needed to produce
beef could be reduced, this does not automatically
mean that the cost of production will be lower as
well. For instance, cells require single amino acids
as feed, and they need to be synthesized or retrieved
from proteins through digestion, adding costs to the
production process.
The production of the final meat product is equiv-
alent for beef produced through livestock or cell
culture and will therefore not result in differences
in efficiency.
Sustainability of cultured beef
For this discussion, sustainability will be used in a
very strict sense, meaning that no natural resource
will be depleted to threaten long-term production
of beef at a scale that is sufficient to satisfy the pro-
jected future demand. Sustainability issues should
be largely related to resource efficiency or produc-
tion. However, current particulars of cultured beef
are inherently unsustainable. Traditional cell cul-
ture requires the addition of serum to the culture
medium for the cells to survive and grow. Serum
is a blood-derived product that is harvested from
bovine fetuses. Apart from the animal welfare issues
arising from the harvesting of fetal blood and the
regulatory issues surrounding an ill-defined biolog-
ical product, the natural-source fetal bovine serum
will be depleted very quickly when cultured beef
obviates the need to keep large herds of cattle. As
a result, breeding programs and, with them, fetal
bovine serum will be decimated.
Fortunately, for many cell types, serum-free cul-
ture medium and corresponding cell culture meth-
ods have been developed. Most of these products
are animal free and contain recombinant proteins
such as growth factors that substitute for serum
proteins.3 For satellite cells, which are dependent
on unusually high concentrations of serum, such a
serum-free medium is not yet available and there-
fore needs to be developed building on the existent
expertise with other cell types. Once such a serum-
free medium has been developed, it will need to be
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Post Cultured beef

Figure 1. Process of culturing beef. Culturing beef requires taking a muscle biopsy from a cow and retrieving the satellite cells.
Satellite cells can be expanded to large numbers. Suspending satellite cells in a gel and providing anchor points while supplying
differentiation medium allow them to differentiate in cross-striated muscle fibers over 3 weeks. Fibers can be harvested and
assembled into a patty together with separately grown fat tissue (not shown).

tested in a large-scale microcarrier-based bioreac- self-assembles and forms a hydrogel induces

tor setup. Time and additional resource efforts will
be needed to accomplish these goals, but they seem
attainable.
A similar problem exists for other animal-derived
materials that are required for the production of cul-
tured beef. The most prominent of these is the hy-
drogel that enables differentiation of satellite cells.
Currently, differentiation is initiated by reduction
of serum in the medium and by placing the cells in
a specific hydrogel consisting of denatured bovine
collagen, which allows the cells to self-organize into
muscle fibers. This is a crucial event in muscle differ-
entiation, as this induces the cells to build up tension
and contractile proteins. Tension can only be gen-
erated if the muscle fibers are firmly anchored. In
previous designs, we provided fixed anchors for the
cell–gel combination to adhere to, but cells adhere
to each other when laid down in a ring shape around
a central elastic material, for instance, an agarose gel
column.
Synthetic variants of matrix proteins have
been produced successfully. Synthetic collagen that
hemostasis in much the same way as natural col-
lagen does.4,5 Other complex matrix proteins have
been mimicked and formulated into a gel to create
a coating that allows cells to grow and that directs
differentiation of stem cells.6 We have been able to
grow satellite cells on this synthetic matrix in a sim-
ilar fashion as on MatrigelTM (unpublished results).
Application as a self-assembling support for bovine
muscle fibers has not been tested yet.
Scalability
Satellite cells, like all cells of mesodermal origin,
are anchor dependent and thus grow only when
adhered to surfaces or in a 3D environment and
not in suspension. For the production of the pro-
totype hamburger, we used traditional 10-layer cell
factories, but it is evident that, for the production
of large quantities of cells, fermenter-type setups,
such as the 25,000 L tank described earlier, are the
only realistic alternatives to date.7 In order to grow
adherent cells in those tanks, either a floating sur-
face needs to be offered or cells need to grow in

Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1328 (2014) 29–33 

C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences. 31
Cultured beef
aggregates suspended in the culture medium (for
review see Ref. 8). In our hands, satellite cells can be
grown on commercially available microcarriers as
well as in aggregates, but both approaches still need
further optimization (unpublished data). Published
data on stem cell production in a microcarrier sys-
tem are currently limited to tank sizes of 5 L or less,9
so there is considerable work ahead to bring this
production to scale.
Biomimicry
We have been working with the assumption that
cultured beef should mimic the livestock-derived
product as close as possible with respect to taste, ap-
pearance, texture, and nutritional value. Since cul-
tured beef originates from the same cells that pro-
duce the livestock product, it is, in theory, possible
to create a phenocopy that faithfully replicates all
of meat’s features. On the basis of our experiences
with the first prototype, we are currently focusing
on complementing the muscle tissue with fat tissue
and enhancing protein production, notably myo-
globin (heme–Fe, color, taste) and the contractile
proteins myosin and actin. We believe these three
optimizations are attainable and will lead to a sig-
nificantly improved cultured beef quality compared
to the first prototype.
Consumer acceptance
It is not immediately obvious that consumers will
accept cultured beef, as it is an unknown product,
produced with a hitherto unexploited technology.
Figure 2. Result from a public survey among 15,000 participants forming a representative cross-section of the Dutch population
age 18 years or older.11 The survey was conducted in the spring of 2013. Figure reproduced (translated from Dutch by author) with
permission of Flycatcher.
32
Post
Collective emotions associated with cultured beef
(or any other unfamiliar foods such as insects)
are referred to as the “yuck factor.”10 At a rational
level, however, consumers appear to be receptive
to the need for a meat alternative and a majority
looks favorably at the cultured beef development.
For instance, in a cross-sectional study in the
Netherlands among 15,000 people (7700 respon-
dents), 63% supported the development of cultured
beef.11 When questioned if they would buy cultured
beef when available in the supermarket, 23%
answered “certainly,” 29% “probably,” 23% “not
sure,” 13% “probably not,” and 12% “certainly not”
(Fig. 2). These results are still preliminary and
limited to specific cultures, but they indicate that
future acceptance of cultured beef is conceivable.
To better understand the various cognitive and
emotional determinants of this yuck factor, they
need to be identified and specifically addressed in
future research. This will facilitate the development
of targeted information and narratives to increase
acceptance of novel foods that have rational benefits.
Conclusion
In summary, cultured beef is an alternative animal
protein source that could relieve some of the envi-
ronmental, sustainability, and ethical issues associ-
ated with livestock beef production. The technology
has the potential to create a product that is nearly
identical to current beef, unlike meat substitutes that
are based on vegetable or insect proteins. However,
the technology is still in its infancy, and well-defined
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1328 (2014) 29–33 
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Post
research goals have been identified to establish qual-
ity improvement, sustainability, scaling of produc-
tion, and consumer acceptance.
Conflicts of interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
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