Researchers are growing the food of the future in this laboratory: meat that uses kelp as an alternative to animal-based ingredients.

It is possible to grow meat in a laboratory. Then you can make a burger without needing to slaughter a bull or a cow. But currently that is still wildly expensive.

Lab-grown – or cultured – meat requires a lot of space. Often blood from aborted calves and inedible beads of microscopic size are necessary ingredients. This will change if senior research scientist Hanna Haslene-Hox and her colleagues at the Norwegian science institute SINTEF achieve their goal.

“How are we going to make animal proteins in a way that does not involve animals at all, or to a much lesser extent? This is how Haslene-Hox outlines the big question that SINTEF and Nofima are working on together.

To that end, the researchers here use kelp, the largest subgroup of seaweed, plus other seaweed species and plant residues instead of blood and synthetic material.

For these proteins are to become human food, producing it in the laboratory is not enough. It has to be grown on a large scale – and more cheaply.

“The first lab-grown burger was produced in 2013. It cost 250 000 euros,” Haslene-Hox says.

The muscle cells that the Norwegian researchers are now growing have to attach to something in the suspension culture.

“We do that really well in culture bottles where the cells can grow in a super-thin layer on the plastic. But if you’re going to grow enough cells for a kilo of meat that way, you would need 700 square metres of bottles. It’s not very practical,” Haslene-Hox says. Seven hundred square metres – that’s equivalent to ten average-size Norwegian apartments.”

The cells grow in a layer that is less than a hundredth of a millimetre thick. For lab-grown meat to become commonplace, researchers first have to enable the cells to grow upwards.

“Instead of growing only on a flat surface, they could grow on tiny microcarrier beads. Then we could fill up a tank with beads that have cells on them. That way you create a much larger surface area for the cells to grow on,” says the senior research scientist.

This approach is already being used to a certain extent today. The researchers use spherical microcarriers made of dextran, for example. Dextran is a long chain of sugar molecules called a polysaccharide.

“But you can’t eat these inedible beads. What you have to do if you’re going to make a steak or a burger is tear the cells loose from the microcarriers after they’ve grown sufficiently. This is a resource-intensive operation, and a lot of cells don’t tolerate it, so they die during the treatment. This generates a lot of waste in the process,” Haslene-Hox says.

What SINTEF and Nofima are trying to achieve is to use materials from nature instead of the dextran beads.

“We’re trying to take bioresources that are left over from producing other things or that we have a lot of, like seaweed and kelp. Then we use them to make microbeads that the cells can grow on and that can then become part of the food. Our project is about making microcarrier that the cells can grow on, and scaling that up in a big stirred-suspension tank,” she says.

The second task is to ensure that the cells get food. Today they are often fed foetal calf serum, which is blood harvested from aborted calves.

“If you’re going to make a product that does not depend on animal husbandry, it’s stupid to use blood. Plus it’s expensive, difficult to obtain, has varying quality, and you can’t put it in people’s food. We have to try to find resources that we can use to feed those cells so that we don’t have to use that kind of serum,” she says.

The food for the cells is a liquid that the cells float around in plus the microcarriers they attach to.

“We believe that we should be able to make both of these things from bioresources that are available in Norway,” says Haslene-Hox. She lists some possibilities, such as seaweed, kelp, residual raw materials from vegetables and plant-based processing, waste from other food industries like salmon farming, eggshells, skin and offal from chickens and cattle.

One of the partners in the research project is Norilia, a company that works with eggshells, feathers and skin. The thin membrane on the inside of the eggshell is part of the baby chick’s embryo sac. It supports cells growth and is so good at it that the membrane can also be used to help wounds heal.

“We’ve looked at whether muscle cells are able to attach to particles from eggshell membranes or whether we can mix them with alginate to get the cells to attach,” she says.

So far, the researchers have found some materials that the muscle cells seem to really like to grow on. The next step they plan to take is to use the microbeads to scale up the cultivation, which they are excited about.

Haslene-Hox poses some questions. “What will happen if we start stirring this mixture? Will the cells stay attached to the bead surface?”

The research involves three projects that have to do with food of the future:

SIP sustainable food and feed. An internal, strategic project that SINTEF itself allocates funds for. This project will develop expertise and good ideas for using kelp and CO₂ for food and feed. This includes developing technology that can be used for cellular agriculture – such as cultured meat. SIP is the abbreviation for "strategic institute-financed project."

ARRIVAL – Modern technology for food production of the future. The goal is to produce milk, eggs and meat proteins using fermentation and cell culture from Norwegian raw materials and by-products. The project will then look at how they can become part of new food products. Nofima is the project leader, and SINTEF is contributing by developing microbeads for cultured meat, using fermentation technology to produce proteins and scaling up the processes.

Food 4Cells: Nofima is heading the project, with industry partners Skretting AI, Norrek Dypfryst and Askim Frukt- og Bærpresseri. SINTEF is contributing screening expertise, testing and scaling up of media developed in the project.