State of the Industry: Cultivated meat, seafood, and ingredients

Regulatory path-to-market milestones bring new, diverse products to consumers

• Cultivated foods and ingredients, including foie gras, pork fat, and salmon, broadened the variety of cultivated products available to consumers. In 2025, more than 140 companies specializing in cultivated meat, along with several large multinational food companies and a growing number of research institutions, worked to innovate and optimize cultivated meat products.
• Bright spot
  • Regulatory pathways are expanding: Regulatory pathways for cultivated foods now exist in Australia-New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, clearing the way for broader commercialization.
• Challenge
  • Hurdles across industry, consumer awareness, and profitability remain: Production efficiency, regulatory roadblocks, consumer acceptance, and overall profitability continue to pose challenges.

The funding environment tightened

• Investors are showing increased discretion, prioritizing companies demonstrating progress on fundamentals like cost, taste, and scale. Cultivated meat and seafood companies raised $73.9 million in 2025, according to a GFI analysis of data from Net Zero Insights (down from $139 million in 2024).
• Bright spot
  • Strengthening metrics key to industry development: Bioreactor capacity in operation, sustained output over time, and run reliability and consistency all were strengthened in 2025. IntegriCulture announced that it achieved profitability by generating revenue from selling research tools and non-food products, a common diversification strategy pursued by startups needing to demonstrate clear and early paths to profitability.
• Challenge
  • Smaller, more targeted investments: The three largest cultivated meat deals in 2025 were Aleph Farms’ $29 million raise, Mosa Meat’s $17.6 million round, and BlueNalu’s $11 million in convertible notes and preferred stock financings. These deals, while significant, each rank outside the top 20 largest cultivated meat deals of all time.

Scientific feasibility

• Bright spot
  • Bovine cells for the whole sector: GFI announced the acquisition of eight cell lines developed by the former startup SCiFi Foods. Through a partnership with Tufts University, researchers within academia and industry now have access to the first publicly available set of suspension-adapted bovine cell lines, enabling the acceleration of commercially relevant research and saving potentially millions in R&D expenses.
• Challenge
  • Several actions are still needed to reduce the risks associated with commercialization: These include depositing cell lines in public repositories to increase accessibility (especially for aquatic animals), creating cell lines with desirable traits such as adaptation to suspension, and research demonstrating the metabolic efficiency of cells in bioreactors to increase commercial relevance.

Engineering viability

• Bright spot
  • Scaling commercial production: Vow achieved production at a 20,000-liter scale at their facility in Sydney, Australia, which hosts 35,000 liters of total capacity and room for 10 more similarly sized production lines. This is the largest current cultivated meat facility in the world, placing its production near the same scale as the largest biopharma processes.
• Challenge
  • Lack of reliable data points for the cost of equipment, facilities, and other infrastructure associated with manufacturing: To reduce the risks associated with high implementation costs, more public knowledge will need to be generated for bioreactor and facility costs at different scales, and other equipment and operational costs, such as media preparation and sterilization, harvesting, waste management, and common consumables.

Innovation capacity

• Bright spot
  • Industry-academic collaborations: The establishment of shared pilot facility infrastructure at research universities can also encourage industry-academic collaborations to validate processes and accelerate new innovations. For example, Tufts University is opening an innovation hub on the Medford campus in 2026.
• Challenge
  • Reducing the risk associated with slow or limited process validation: More cultivated meat products need to be sustained on restaurant menus and, eventually, in grocery store meat cases. Companies should continue to publish research to share process validation results and help de-silo research findings.

Public investment is growing in some places, declining in others

• Governments with concerns like supply chain constraints and product shortages are increasingly integrating cultivated meat into their national food strategies and biotechnology plans, recognizing the potential benefits to the economy, food system, and national security.
• Bright spot
  • China: In May 2025, the state-owned State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC) announced a commitment of over CNY 4 billion ($555 million) to advance biomanufacturing infrastructure development through investments in domestic biotechnology companies. “New proteins” feature prominently.
• Challenge
  • United States: The U.S. drastically scaled back all federally funded R&D in 2025. As a result, new federal investments in cultivated meat and enabling technologies in the United States declined. In doing so, the United States bucks the global trend of investing more competitively in food biotechnology and biomanufacturing.