UK-based Multus has opened a world first media manufacturing facility to help cultivated meat companies cut costs as they scale up production and accelerate from lab to market.

The new facility is the first of its kind to achieve FSSC 22000 certification, establishing Multus as a ‘food-safe’ global scaling partner. It uniquely combines the quality requirements for cell culturing with the food safety requirements of the meat industry.

Multus can support cultivated meat companies around the world in producing up to an estimated 500 tonnes of meat per year. This manufacturing capacity has the potential to significantly expand the global supply of cultivated meat.  “The cultivated meat industry has to prove it can scale up with affordable products. The supply chain is critical to this in providing low-cost feedstocks that meet important safety standards and other regulatory requirements. As a developer and a manufacturer, we’re now ready to support companies reaching commercial scale,” said Reka Tron, COO and Co-Founder of Multus. Sourcing and preparing media is a challenge and growing cost for cultivated meat companies that are expanding. Larger operations demand larger volumes of media sourcing, quality control and mixing in preparation for the bioreactors. The challenge worsens as the company scales its production and requires a supply with greater reliability and reduced price.

This often means that time, money and capacity get spent on media sourcing over crucial R&D. Multus will partner with cultivated meat companies to take the headache of media manufacturing away from their internal teams. By freeing up resources to focus on core R&D in science and engineering, Multus will give companies an advantage in the race to make cultivated meat affordable. Multus is already an established media developer. It is backed by the UK Government’s research agency, Innovate UK, as part of a major investment into low-emission food production systems. With food-safe manufacturing capacity now available, Multus will partner globally with cultivated meat companies as a key part of the media supply chain.

Reka Tron, COO and Co-Founder of Multus