Impact of Production Bioreactor Scale on Cultivated Meat Techno-Economic Analysis

Increases in global meat demands cannot be sustainably met with current methods of livestock farming, which has a substantial impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water consumption. Cultivated meat (CM) is a rapidly advancing technology that produces meat products by proliferating and differentiating animal stem cells in bioreactors, avoiding conventional live-animal farming. While many companies are working in this area, there is a lack of existing infrastructure and experience at commercial scale, resulting in many technical bottlenecks such as scale-up of cell culture as well as media availability and costs. Computer based techno-economic models and analyses (TEAs) can help identify economic drivers/bottlenecks at scale. Currently available published TEAs are based on models in which the maximum cultivated meat bioreactor volume is less than 25 m³, however larger bioreactors will likely be required for the CM industry to reach economies of scale. In this study, we use the computer-aided process design software SuperPro Designer^® to design alternative production facilities for production of unstructured bovine cells to meet a target of 100,000,000 kg of cultured beef per year. We evaluated the impact of production bioreactor size (ranging from 40 to 260 m³) and type (stirred tank versus airlift) on process economics to highlight improvements that can lower the cost of CM production systems.