As future food regulation progresses in Japan, local startup Organoid Farm has completed a 200-litre demo run for its cultivated beef, ahead of opening a new production plant in 2028.
Japan’s Organoid Farm has successfully conducted one of the country’s largest cellular agriculture tests to produce cultivated meat.
The Fujisawa-based startup has completed a demo run in 200-litre bioreactors, spanning the entire process, from culturing bovine muscle cells to harvesting cultivated beef.
A subsidiary of JGC Holdings Corporation, Organoid Farm said the milestone helped it obtain cultivation process data for commercial production and establish a technological foundation for scale-up and cost reduction.
Scaffold-free process simplifies production and lowers costs
For the demo production, JGC Holdings’s Technical Research Institute used a bioreactor for animal cells and a bovine muscle cell line considered difficult to culture.
The team leveraged a suspension culture process that eschewed scaffolding materials (such as fine particles and gel-like compounds), which typically help cells attach and proliferate.
Despite promoting growth, scaffolds increase the complexity of the preparation and recovery processes for cultivated meat and raise costs. By doing away with them, Organoid Farm streamlines raw material costs and recovery processes, and simplifies the culture environment.
This enables uniform agitation and a stable culture process suitable for cell proliferation, while also making operational aspects like equipment cleaning and sterilisation more efficient.
The startup carried out the cell culture process from January to February this year, and acquired the proliferated cells in the first run itself. Unlike ordinary bovine muscle cells, Organoid Farms’s patented cell line can continue multiplying without stopping cell division midway, which it said would lead to greater production volumes in the future.
Organoid Farm plans cultivated meat facility amid regulatory talks
Organoid Farm noted that it has been working to industrialise the production of cell-cultured foods by utilising its suspension culture scale-up technology and advanced bovine cells. In addition, it is leveraging JGC Holdings’s scale-up expertise in bioreactors and its engineering know-how in fields such as pharmaceuticals and regenerative medicine.
It is now verifying the improvements in cell culture efficiency and exploring opportunities for collaboration with partners. It plans to build a new facility to scale up production to commercial levels, develop new prototypes, and conduct demos of cell-cultured foods for practical application. This site is slated to open in 2028.
The development comes as government and industry stakeholders – including the Consumer Affairs Agency’s Subcommittee on Newly Developed Foods and the Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture – work to establish a regulatory framework for the approval of cultivated meat in the East Asian nation.
Tokyo-based IntegriCulture has stated that it’s conducting manufacturing trials in preparation for a planned launch of its cultivated meat in spring 2027, while UK startup Hoxton Farms is also eyeing approval in Japan.
Moreover, Japanese conglomerate Ajinomoto recently developed a plant-derived transferrin alternative that can significantly reduce culture media costs for cultivated meat production, and it aims to bring it to market in the coming years.
