Next step for cultivated meat in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the taste testing of cultivated meat will occur under an industry ‘code of practice, developed by the government in collaboration with cultivated meat producers Meatable and Mosa Meat and related sector firm HollandBIO. Cellular Agriculture Netherlands will implement the code, hiring a panel of experts to evaluate requests by companies to conduct tastings of cultivated pork and other type of meat.

National Growth Fund

The Dutch government has also created a ‘National Growth Fund’ of € 60 million euro’s to make The Netherlands a centre for ‘cellular agriculture.’ This fund will go to public education, research products and more.

Farmer conflict

This comes at a time when the Dutch government is still in conflict with mainly pig and dairy producers over a plan to reduce the national number of farms in order to address concerns over the amount of nitrogen iin the environment.

A commission has proposed that hundreds of Dutch farms close voluntary, and the government has stated that it “wants to prevent mandatory measures.” Forced farm buy-outs are already occurring in Belgium. Whether the buy-outs of Dutch farms will actually occur is anyone’s guess, with the Agriculture Minister resigning in late 2022 and the Prime Minister resigning in early July.

Pig protein in soybeans

Coming from the opposite angle, the UK-based company called Moolec has just announced it has created transgenic soybean plants with pig genes that produce soybeans containing about 25% pig proteins. The plants are known as ‘Piggy Sooy.’ Moolec is also creating pea plants that contain beef proteins. The exact pig genes that have been added to the soybean plants is proprietary.

Approval in the US

Cultivated meat has just been approved for sale in the US for 2 companies: Good Meat and Upside. Good Meat has been selling its products in Singapore for some time. US-based cultivated meat developer Mission Barns offered the US public the chance to try bacon grown from pig fat cells.

BioTech Foods (51% owned by the Brazilian meat giant JBS) has just announced it will begin building the world’s largest cultured meat facility in Spain. Whilst the type of meat to be produced is not specified, the facility will produce about 1,000 metric tons per year, with capacity to expand output to 4,000 tons. JBS will also spend $ 60 million USD to construct a research institute in Brazil for growing meat from animal cells.