IFFA 2025 live: Meatable CEO on using cell-culture to complement the meat industry

At this year’s IFFA trade show in Frankfurt, Germany (May 3–8), Dutch biotech company Meatable continues the conversation on adopting cultivated meat, focusing on how it can be leveraged to complement the meat industry amid enduring supply and cost challenges.

Food Ingredients First speaks with CEO Jeff Tripician live on the show floor about what to expect from Meatable’s talk sessions at the show, the company’s “fundamentally different” strategy for scaling its technology and navigating regulatory approvals in Europe. Also, crucially, whether consumers are willing to bite.

What can visitors expect at your sessions?

Tripician: We have a significant challenge in the food industry, specifically in the meat industry: supply over time, which includes stability and confidence. As population growth and demand increase, we’ve got to be able to have that supply arrive at quality and on time. So, we have some solutions to help the industry.

Are consumers ready for cultivated meat, and what are they looking for in these products?

Tripician: I think consumers look for safety in any food product, as it’s for them and their families. Regulators are doing a great job in the food system in general, and they are also doing so with cultivated meat. Specifically, they are ready, especially younger consumers, because cultivated meat is a technology-first thought. And as we all know, younger consumers are so much more open to technology solving problems, so cultivated meat fits in perfectly.

How does cultivated meat fit into and support the existing meat industry?

Tripician: Our strategy is fundamentally different than most in the cultivated meat space. We are a vendor to the meat industry. Simply put, we’re an option for sourcing raw material. It’s not very sexy, but it’s really important. It’s a US$2 trillion industry annually, growing at a nice pace every year, predictably. So, having the meat industry have alternatives to real meat to meet that demand is crucial to their success, and we’re just the technologically advanced answer for that.

What makes your approach to cultured meat more scalable and cost-effective compared to others?

Tripician: Cultivated meat can dramatically decrease the time it takes to produce a product and do it much more efficiently from a feed conversion standpoint. [These are] two big issues for the meat industry: lead time and balance. You’re not raising an entire animal to get the part you really want in cultivated meat. You make what you need, and you make it very quickly. Now, we do it in 11 days. Most of the cultivated meat industry takes about 45 days. And obviously, the livestock industry takes a year or two or longer, depending on the protein.

What are the biggest challenges you’re solving right now in bringing cultivated meat to market?

Tripician: It’s a couple of things, because it’s a very young industry. Just like the first electric car, the first computer, the first of anything, it takes time to figure out the difference between whether it works in a laboratory or desktop setting, and how it applies at scale. The meat industry is massive, so being able to prove you can do it in a little bit gives people confidence, but people aren’t going to commercialize until you have volume. So, scale is the issue.

How do you get enough to make the meat industry say it’s worthwhile? That’s the big issue. With scale, you get price or cost. So we can see that in the next four years, we will have a clear line to cost at a price that the meat industry and consumers will embrace. Scale is the key.

Soil degradation, water pollution and supply, climate, and hunger are global issues, and there needs to be a global answer, says Tripician.We’re scaling with partners, both vendors in the industry and pharma solutions that know how to do this, so it’s a fundamentally different approach. We’re working with the industry to figure out scaling and trying to be a vendor to them, versus going in alone and trying to compete with them. That is not our plan. We’re not going to be a competitor. We’re going to be a supplier.

What’s your outlook on regulatory approvals for cell-based meat in Europe? And how are you preparing to navigate?

Tripician: The regulatory process is the other issue that is out of our control, or that is out of any company’s control. So first, you applaud it because it keeps everybody safe, and then you try to figure out how to navigate it. Today, we’re working with 11 countries on how best to navigate their regulatory environment on a novel product. It’s not like they have a history of doing this, so we’re figuring it out together. It’s very collegial and very supportive. That’s going well.

Each one takes its time. Some are as quick as six months from now, and some will be years. Certain countries or areas we know have some rules that, knowing them, you can navigate. So we have multiple product lines, some GMO-driven, some non-GMO. We can do different things to facilitate speed through regulation, and we’re doing that right now.

What role will cell culture play in the global protein market in the upcoming years?

Tripician: We’ll continue to scale and brace meat companies, but it’s not a year from now. The size of the prize is a global answer. We have a global problem. Soil degradation, water pollution, water supply, climate, and hunger are global issues, and there needs to be a global answer. We could make money more quickly if we picked one plant in one country and said, ‘Let’s make some money.’ That’s not the goal. We’re still going to make money, but we’re going to do it on a global level by getting the meat industry to accept as part of the answer: why not get the additional supply they can get quicker and more efficiently?

It fits right in with what they’re doing. They don’t need a new piece of equipment. They don’t have to deploy capex. None of those things is required. So it’s easy for them to do what they do well, and they have a hard job. We’re going to make supplying some more meat relatively simple. That’s the challenge.