World population growth has increased the demand for meat. One source approximates that meat consumption is expected to rise by 1.4 % annually. An additional source found that from 2012 to 2021, 340 billion metric tons of meat were consumed globally. This has had a critical effect on the environment.
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Around 31 % of global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions originate from agri-food systems and conventional meat production. These emissions are contributing significantly to environmental disasters and global warming.
There is an acute need for scientists to discover a more sustainable alternative. The growth of cultivated meat has provided hope, offering a shift from traditional cattle farming to a procedure that uses living animal tissue to create meat products that are like traditionally farmed meat (regarding nutritional value, taste, and texture). However, this technology is still relatively new and faces many challenges before it can be deemed safe for human consumption.
This article explores how cell density sensors can assist in overcoming meat cultivation process challenges, making cultivated meat production more cost-effective.
Top 3 Struggles the Cultivated Meat Industry is Facing
Massive advancements have been made in the cultivated meat industry over the past ten years. Despite this, three significant challenges still face the industry (process optimization, media optimization, plus upscaling and scale-up). Creating cultivated meat remains expensive and inaccessible because of these challenges.
1. Process Optimization
Organizations rely on stem cells to produce cultivated meat. Several components of stem cells can be utilized to generate meat; however, it is expensive and time-consuming to develop stem cell lines that are appropriate enough for production.
After these cell lines are collected, they have a short shelf life – with the majority expiring prior to use in production. Creating acceptable cell lines can take six to eighteen months, which is time many organizations do not have. Until organizations can streamline the process and sustain cell line quality, the production of cultivated meat will remain a long, costly process.
2. Media Optimization
Media preparation is perhaps the costliest component of the cultivated meat process. To maintain cellular growth, scientists use cell culture media. Without this media, it would be almost impossible to grow cells in an artificial environment.
According to the Good Food Institute, producing cell culture media accounts for 55-95% of the marginal costs of cultivated meat. Many organizations do not have this budget, making it expensive to create cost-effective cultivated meat.
3. Upscaling and Scale Up
Lack of scalability is another challenge to cost-efficient cultivated meat. According to the National Library of Medicine: “Cell culture with current conventional planar culture systems, presents significant limitations related to their low surface to volume ratio…and is therefore not scalable.”
Due to this lack of scalability, organizations can only produce a small quantity of cells, which decreases the quantity of cultivated meat that can be created. As organizations expand and meat demand increases, it is harder for organizations to sustain optimum process parameters, which can decrease overall meat quality.
These three parameters make the cultivated meat process costly and time-consuming. Fortunately, Hamilton offers technology that increases yield while concurrently stabilizing costs and streamlining the meat cultivation process.
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How Hamilton Overcomes Meat Cultivation Process Challenges
From sustaining an optimum environment for cell culture creation to delivering real-time measurements to guarantee viable cell density, Hamilton can improve processes while concurrently minimizing costs. Hamilton offers numerous sensors that help reduce production expenses around cultivated meat.
Hamilton’s Incyte Arc Viable Cell Density sensor delivers production with direct measurements of manufactured meat mass. This sensor provides real-time, precise metrics (irrespective of variations in media, microcarriers, dead cells, or debris). This gives organizations more control, which leads to more yield, reduced operating expenses, and increased reproducibility.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations must remain in range to produce high-quality cultivated meat. The CO2NTROL Sensor delivers real-time measurements of dissolved CO2, thus allowing production to generate perfect conditions for cell growth.
Using a pH sensor to measure pH levels throughout cultivation enables organizations to quicken cell growth drastically. Along with the biocompatible Foodlyte electrolyte, the pH Sensor guarantees high-quality food production while keeping expenses low.
Oxygen is a key factor for cellular respiration and cellular growth. The VisiFerm RS485 Sensor is a dissolved oxygen sensor that quickens cell growth and improves product output by measuring dissolved oxygen in-line, which provides tighter process control.
Hamilton also helps organizations within the cultivated meat industry to overcome the difficulties of offline measurement. Without this data, organizations do not have the necessary information to improve production processes and identify where to reduce expenses.
Additional challenges of offline measurement include the following: planning resources (such as money and time), blocking resources, contamination, information gaps, no process control, handling deviation (because of measurement variation), and product removal.
Hamilton’s real-time sensors eradicate the difficulties associated with offline measurement and provide organizations with all the data needed for optimal process control. With this data, organizations can create more yield at a fraction of the cost.
Real-time data captured by Hamilton’s sensors directly measures products and crucial process parameters. This results in improved batch-to-batch reproducibility, which enables organizations to increase consistency across research and development to production.
Hamilton’s sensors can also help organizations automate processes, thus reducing monetary waste and the need for manual labor.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by Hamilton Process Analytics.
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