Novel Farms, Inc., a food technology startup based in Berkeley, Calif., has been awarded the highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The $999,967 two-year grant is a testament to Novel Farms' work in the field of cultivated meat production and will provide critical funding to support the scale-up of their proprietary scaffolding platform. The innovative platform leverages a novel microbial fermentation approach and tissue engineering techniques to significantly reduce the costs associated with cultivated meat.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CULTIVATED MEAT

At the core of this project lies the ambition to address the profound sustainability and public health challenges posed by conventional industrial animal agriculture. By developing more efficient and economical ways to produce real meat directly from animal cells i.e., cultivated meat, Novel Farms aims to disrupt the current damaging meat production paradigm. The primary challenge faced by the cultivated meat industry is the cost of cell culture media, which must be competitive with conventional meat production to establish cultivated meat as a viable alternative. To confront this challenge head-on, Novel Farms' Phase II project is geared towards further lowering media costs by eliminating costly components through the continued refinement of their proprietary scaffolding technology. This crucial funding injection will empower the company to expand its scientific team and transition its processes from bench scale to bioreactor scale—a pivotal step towards establishing an efficient and scalable cultivated meat production system.

www.seedfund.nsf.gov