Now, researchers from Singapore and China have found a way to use food waste for culturing meat, reducing production costs and helping to make cultured meat a viable option for feeding the world's population.

Scaling up production

To produce cultured meat, animal muscle stem cells are grown on a scaffold which improves the environment for the cells by enabling the transport of nutrients and allows the generation of texture and structure. Without it, the meat is more likely to resemble lumpy mashed potatoes.

Unique scaffolds can be created using an emerging 3D-printing technology, Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing. As the scaffolds become part of the meat product, they need to be edible, so are generally made from animal products such as gelatine and collagen, or synthetic materials, but are expensive to produce. Finding cost-effective edible inks for printing is one of the main challenges in producing cultured meat.

In a recent study published in Advanced Materials, researchers have developed edible plant-based ink that is derived from food waste, such as cereal husks. The new ink can be fully absorbed into the meat product and is cheap to produce, so it could significantly reduce the cost of large-scale cultured meat production.