Review in edible materials for sustainable cultured meat: scaffolds and microcarriers production

Abstract

SummaryCultured meat, also known as lab‐grown or cell‐based meat, is a promising concept in the food industry that involves culturing animal cells in vitro to produce meat products, bypassing the need for traditional animal rearing and slaughter. This technology offers solutions to key challenges associated with conventional meat production, including environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and food security. However, the cultured meat industry must overcome significant hurdles to achieve commercial viability. Scaling up production to meet the increasing demand for meat is a considerable challenge, requiring a scalable edible scaffold, eliminating the need for separate scaffold removal, and ensuring product safety. Various edible materials, including polysaccharides and proteins, along with fabrication techniques like electrospinning and 3D printing, are explored in this review article.

The Need for Research on the Comparison of Sensory Characteristics between Cultured Meat Produced Using Scaffolds and Meat

“…The factor that has the most practical influence on the scaffold of cultured meat is the tissue, and as shown in Chapters 1 and 2, the method of manufacturing the scaffold varies depending on the material ( Szymczyk-Ziółkowska et al, 2020 ). Most 3D scaffolds are manufactured using natural materials, such as animal collagen, chitosan, and vegetable cellulose, as they are often consumed as-is after producing cultured meat ( Moslemy et al, 2023 ). In most cases, collagen is made into hydrogel or MC, and because it is already extracted from animal protein, this scaffold has a texture similar to meat ( Chen et al, 2023 ).…”

Regenerative Food Innovation: The Role of Agro-Food Chain By-Products and Plant Origin Food to Obtain High-Value-Added Foods

“…This emphasis on employing measures to reduce waste production in a short period of time has also created intense interest in the opportunity to recover and reuse waste from production and process operations [6][7][8][9]. Much of the focus has been on improving the recovery rates from plant- [10] and meat-based material [11] to reduce the impact on the environment and create added-value products that can be used as ingredients in the circular economy within food ingredient utilisation. These initiatives have a beneficial effect in terms of recovering potentially powerful bioactive compounds, which may be effective in the improvement of human health, with research illustrating the potential to utilise waste streams from plant-based products as enhancers to the nutritional quality of processed foods [9,[11][12][13][14].…”

Viewpoint: could cultivated meat's real route to mainstream markets be as hybrid food ‐ why this makes sense?

“…Thus, cultivated meat will not benefit from maturation as regards tendering, which contrasts with traditional meat. Frameworks, therefore, need to be incorporated to build such structure, for example, in the form of scaffolds, from plant-based or other sources (Moslemy et al, 2023). However, looking at this absence of structure as an opportunity rather than a constraint, we see possibility that cultivated meat may ultimately offer more nuanced or complicated structure characteristics (Mirzapour-Kouhdasht et al, 2024) and perhaps also deliver more diverse biopeptides (Le et al, 2023) compared to other meat analogues.…”