From media to scaffolding: How plant-based materials are reshaping cultivated meat

As cultivated meat companies push beyond proof-of-concept and toward commercialization, some of the sector’s most stubborn challenges – cost, scalability, texture and production – are being addressed not through new animal cell breakthroughs, but through plants.

From cell culture media to structural scaffolding, a growing cohort of startups is reframing plant-based materials not as competing alternatives to cultivated meat, but as functional enablers that help the industry move from lab-scale experimentation to viable production.

“The conclusion that we’ve had for most of 2025 actually was tech is no longer the obstacle,” said Suzi Gerber, executive director of the Alliance for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation (AMPS). “The tech is there, the innovations that would get you there are there. What remains is to build it.”

Two companies – Deco Labs and TrueMeat – offer a window into what that building phase now looks like.

Tackling media costs with plant-derived proteins

For Deco Labs, the challenge was clear early on: cell culture media remains one of the largest cost barriers to cultivated meat reaching price parity.

After winning the pitch competition during Future Food-Tech last year for its plant-based albumin alternative, Deco Labs’ Co-Founder Natalie Rubio realized that the ingredient “really does solve a pain point for the industry and enables cost reduction,” she said.

Albumin is a key protein found in animal blood and is a critical component in the creation of serum-free growth media to replace the costly fetal bovine serum (FBS). While albumin is cheaper than FBS, its high cost still remains a hurdle for cell-cultured formulations.

Deco Labs developed a plant-derived, food-grade alternative to albumin, explained Rubio. The ingredient is produced from canola meal – a low-cost byproduct of canola oil production (canola meal) – and is designed to function as a drop-in replacement.

While canola meal has historically been used for animal feed, Deco Labs upcycles the material to isolate a functional protein “that’s able to function really well in cell culture,” she said.

The company’s approach is rooted in unit economics. Canola meal is abundant, inexpensive and globally available, and the processing methods mirror established protein isolate production already used at scale in the food industry.

“Our production process looks pretty similar to soy protein isolate production,” Rubio said. “So all of the unit operations are pretty simple and have been proven to scale to very large capacity.”

Deco Labs is targeting a dramatic cost reduction.

“We aim to be a thousand times cheaper at scale,” Rubio said, adding that plant-derived inputs may also face fewer regulatory hurdles than recombinant proteins already in use. “I think that ingredients that come from plants, that are already present in the food system, are going to have an easier time with regulatory acceptance.”

That trajectory reflects a broader industry shift. “We’ve had breakthroughs in media component development… most notably, food grade media,” Gerber noted.

Using plants to solve the texture problem

While Deco Labs focuses on what cells grow in, TrueMeat, a cellular ag startup, is focused on what cultivated meat is built on.

The early-stage Tufts University spinout is developing whole-cut meat products using plant-based materials as structural scaffolding, with animal cells incorporated later for flavor and biological fidelity, explained TrueMeat Co-founder Rickey Kallicharan.

The startup is in its early stages where it only “just established complex scaffolding, and we are trying to get to the point where we have a plant-based, forkable prototype,” he explained.

TrueMeat’s strategy starts with soy, not as a finished product, but as a functional building material to develop whole cuts of meat.

“We think about the plants as the building material, rather than the end product,” Kallicharan said. “We focused on soy because it’s one of the most well understood functional and scalable plant proteins.”

That familiarity matters when the goal is replicating the “structure and texture that behave more like meat,” due to a “strong elastic network,” he explained.

The company has also developed proprietary equipment to support the scaffolding production, with a clear eye toward commercialization timelines – a priority for investors in today’s funding environment.

“That’s important to investors right now,” Kallicharan said. “How quickly can you get to the first dollar.”

From innovation to execution

Despite different technical approaches, Deco Labs and TrueMeat share a common philosophy: plant-based materials are not a detour from cultivated meat’s promise, but a way to make it real and potentially cost effective to produce.

For TrueMeat, success ultimately comes down to consumer experience. “I think adoption will really be driven by products that simply eat well,” Kallicharan said. “It fits naturally into meals, and consumers don’t have to compromise.”

And for the sector as a whole, the shift toward plant-derived inputs and hybrid systems signals a maturation moment – one where the focus is less on whether cultivated meat can work, and more on how to build it efficiently, affordably and at scale.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of TrueMeat, which was previously misspelled as TruMeat.