“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis, on May 1.

“Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

Florida’s commissioner for agriculture went further: “Lab-grown meat is a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity, and is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture.”

In recent years, cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown meat, has gained significant attention as a potential solution to the challenges faced by the traditional meat industry. This innovative process involves growing animal stem cells in a nutrient-rich culture medium, and assembling them into a 3D structure that mimics the texture and shape of traditional meat, resulting in a product with similar or identical texture, taste, and cellular characteristics to animal meat.

One driving goal for cultivated meat has been to reduce the environmental footprint of meat consumption, given the CO2 emissions associated with deforestation and other land use change, to make way for pasture, as well as the methane emissions – another greenhouse gas – associated with the animals themselves.

One hurdle has been regulation. The global landscape for cultivated meat has been evolving, with some countries, like Singapore, welcoming the technology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the safety of cultivated chicken, last year.

But U.S. federal safety approval hasn’t stopped Republican states from banning it: Alabama followed Florida, and other states are considering similar moves. Meanwhile, Italy’s right-wing government banned cultivated meat last year, also citing a defence of traditional farming.

Besides regulation, other cultivated meat hurdles include cost and scale.

At New Food Finance, our focus is the investment, technology and environmental opportunities from a green transition in food production. We find that one hot spot for cultivated meat investment recently has been to develop and supply the growth media in which cells are cultivated.

Culture media are a mixture of nutrients and growth factors for the cells to replicate and grow outside an animal. Most growth factors are currently used for pharmaceutical purposes, and not food-grade standard. As a result, traditional lab-grown meat production has relied on Foetal Bovine Serum (FBS), which is animal-reliant, inaccessible, costly, and raises consumer and ethical concerns.

The industry is working to develop cost-effective, FBS-free, growth media formulations, to support optimal cell growth and differentiation.

We identify the following leading companies, among a cast of 20 that we find operating specifically in the growth media space (see Figure 1 below):

IntegriCulture: has developed a patented system that induces cells naturally to secrete growth factors, eliminating the need for expensive recombinant equivalents. The company says it has grown serum-free, cultivated chicken and duck meat at a fraction of the cost of animal-based growth factors. The company has raised $19mln to date.

ProFuse Technology: has developed a media supplement that can shorten the cultivated meat production process, by accelerating the differentiation, fusion, and maturation rates of muscle cells. The supplement can be used with various types of cells and media, including serum-free formulations. The company has raised $6mln to date.

ORF Genetics: is targeting affordable, recombinant growth factors for cultivated meat, using barley seed extract. The company says its selected barley seed proteins provide stabilizing proteins to prolong the lifetime of the growth factors, while enhancing bioactivity. The company is partnering with a South Korean company, SeaWith, to accelerate the production of cultivated meat, using its plant-based growth factors.

The long-term growth of cultivated meat will depend more than anything on consumer acceptance, which means overcoming cost and ethical concerns, first and foremost