Cultivated Meat Just Got 19 Times More Productive. Here Is Why That Matters.

The cultivated meat industry has spent more than a decade optimizing one number: cell density. Pack more animal cells into each liter of bioreactor volume, the logic went, and you get more meat. On October 13, two companies announced results suggesting the industry has been measuring the wrong thing, or at least an incomplete one.

Ever After Foods, an Israeli industrial protein company, and Roslin Technologies, the Edinburgh-based animal cell specialist, reported that their combined production platform delivers 19 times more cultivated protein and 19 times more dry biomass per liter than the same cells grown in a conventional stirred-tank suspension system. Wet biomass productivity rose 11 times. The headline figures are striking, but the detail underneath them is more interesting.

The numbers behind the headline

The joint program pairs two technologies. Roslin contributes porcine pluripotent stem cells, versatile cell lines capable of growing into many tissue types. Ever After Foods contributes its Edible Packed Bed technology, or EPB, in which cells grow into structured tissue directly on PlantriX, a proprietary edible, plant-based scaffold, inside a food-grade bioreactor.

The platform reached cell densities above 150 million cells per milliliter, with volumetric productivity of 326 grams per liter of wet biomass, 57 grams per liter of dry biomass, and 40 grams per liter of cultivated protein. Crucially, all reported figures exclude the scaffold and the growth media: they measure only cultivated, cell-derived material, with the scaffold accounting for less than 2 percent of the final product by weight.

The industry has become very good at growing cells, but cells are not the final product. What matters commercially is how efficiently those cells produce edible protein and tissue.

That framing comes from Eyal Rosenthal, CEO of Ever After Foods, and it captures the conceptual shift the companies are pushing. For years the cultivated meat field treated cell density as the master metric. Rosenthal argues that commercial production ultimately depends on something downstream: how much edible protein and structured tissue those cells actually yield.

Density is not the whole story

The most instructive part of the announcement is the decomposition of the gain. The EPB system achieved about five times higher cell density than the suspension benchmark, but that explains only part of the improvement. Each individual cell also produced roughly four times more protein and dry biomass. Multiply those together, and you arrive at the 19-fold result.

Barak Zohar, the company's chief technology officer, told Food Ingredients First that this distinction is central to manufacturing economics: more cells per liter, plus more nutritional value per cell, together produce far higher productivity than suspension-based cultivation of the same cells. The scaffolded environment appears to change how the cells behave, coaxing them to synthesize more of the material that actually becomes food.

This is an important argument because the density race has diminishing returns. Stirred-tank bioreactors, borrowed from the pharmaceutical industry, shear and stress cells as they swirl, and packing more cells in means more expensive media consumed per batch. A system that gets more product out of each cell attacks the cost equation from the other side. It also reduces downstream processing, since structured tissue forms directly on the edible scaffold instead of being harvested as loose cell mass and then formed into something edible.

Why pork, and why a partnership

Ernst van Orsouw, CEO of Roslin Technologies, described the collaboration as proof that complementary technologies can be integrated to address scale-up challenges, pointing to the versatility of the company's porcine pluripotent stem cells across bioreactor systems. Pork is a pragmatic starting point: it is the most consumed meat on the planet, and pig cells are well understood in cell biology.

The partnership structure itself reflects how the cultivated meat sector is maturing. Rather than one startup trying to solve cell biology, media formulation, and manufacturing engineering simultaneously, the industry is dividing labor. Roslin specializes in cell platforms and licenses them to producers. Ever After Foods builds the production infrastructure and integrates partner technologies into it. That division mirrors how biopharma works, where cell lines, media, and bioprocess equipment come from different suppliers.

The two companies say they are now extending the work through further development and scale-up efforts aimed at advancing the combined platform toward commercial production.

What still stands between the lab and the shelf

Honest accounting requires caveats. These results come from the companies' own program, reported in their own press release, not a peer-reviewed paper. The comparison is against a stirred-tank benchmark the companies chose, and suspension systems are a technology many producers are already moving away from. The 19-fold figure measures productivity relative to that benchmark, not cost, and productivity is only one input into the price of a cultivated pork cutlet.

The industry's biggest cost driver remains the growth media, the nutrient-rich broth that feeds the cells. University of Queensland researchers recently estimated that recycling waste nutrients through microalgae could cut media costs by 60 to 90 percent, and South African biotech firm Immobazyme has commercialized cheaper growth factors. Those are separate battles being fought in parallel, and the EAF-Roslin result does not by itself resolve them.

Still, the direction of travel is consistent. Regulators keep opening doors: Singapore's food safety authority has cleared six cultivated meat products, and the UK cleared cultivated pet food. Aleph Farms is targeting a 2027 Singapore launch for its cultivated steak. Meatly is building a 20,000-liter pilot plant in London. The bottleneck has shifted from permission to production economics, and production economics is exactly the territory this announcement claims to advance.

The deeper point may outlast this particular result. If the industry's next gains come from per-cell output rather than cell count, then the engineering problem changes shape: less about bigger tanks and more about better biology, better scaffolds, better ways to let cells do what cells already know how to do. That is a harder problem, but it is also the one that actually ends at a dinner plate.