Ensuring quality in cultivated meat: A review of recent developments in flavor, texture, and nutrition

Producing meat from cultivated animal cells has the potential to provide significant environmental, health, and societal benefits. For these benefits to be realized, cultivated meat must match the sensory and nutritional properties expected from meat. The quality of evidence and the apparent performance thus far varies across the areas of flavor, texture, and nutrition, and overall this technology remains at an early stage of development. However, there remains enormous potential for improvements to basic processes to unlock further sensory and nutritional improvements. While ensuring their products’ success on these benchmarks is primarily the responsibility of individual companies, academia has an important role to play in understanding and addressing shared sensory and nutritional challenges across the field. This will require strong collaboration across multiple disciplines, including tissue engineering, materials science, food science, and sensory science. This review explores the performance of existing cultivated meat products and prototypes on metrics relevant to flavor, texture, and nutrition, and how the inputs and processing steps can influence these product characteristics. Where possible, we recommend specific strategies to address measured deficits in sensory and nutritional properties, as well as those for addressing gaps in data.