In this presentation, a Biotech Foods representative outlines the company’s mission to develop and produce cultivated meat in San Sebastian, Spain. The speaker frames the global food crisis—driven by rapid population growth, limited arable land, and high greenhouse‑gas emissions from livestock—as a catalyst for alternative protein sources. After reviewing existing alternatives (plant‑based, insect, algae), the talk positions cultivated meat as a balanced, sustainable option that uses animal muscle cells grown in fermenters to create meat fibers, dramatically reducing water, land, and emissions. The speaker acknowledges current challenges: regulatory approval, consumer acceptance, and scaling production, but notes rapid price declines, industry collaborations (meat and biopharma sectors), and growing consumer willingness—especially among younger generations. The presentation concludes by linking cultivated meat to eight UN Sustainable Development Goals and invites questions.
Chapters
with the, uh, my pitch. So Biotech Foods is a, is a food company. It is based in San Sebastian, north of Spain, and we are, uh, research, develop, and produce cultivated meat. Cultivated meat is, is real, is healthy, is sustainable, and it's tasty and allows you to make dishes like this one. This steak tartare has been done using our product. And it will allow us really to face some of the challenges that the food industry is facing nowadays. So let me start with those challenges that we are facing today. Population has been growing at a very amazing pace in the last years. In fact, we have more than doubled our population in the last 50 years, but this is not going to stop here. Although the growth rate is decreasing because yes, there is less births, but it is mortality. Infancy has radically go down and life expectancy is really increasing. So it is expected that the population will keep growing, and not just by the end of this century we will be eleven billion. Yes, in thirty years we will be nine billion. So obviously we humans like to consume. Okay, not just because we enjoy. Because we need it to survive, and we will need to create more calories in order to keep with this growth of the population. And this is going to create a food gap of 56%. Obviously, in order to feed this gap, you need resources. Okay, one of those resources is land. All resources are scarce, but land is already used very heavily. Yes, we need to know 50, 38 percent of all habitable land in the world is used for livestock. Okay, and this is one of the main cause of deforestation at Amazonia, for example. Okay, you will have to really close that that gap. We will have to use 49 percent more land, and that will make it totally unsustainable. Obviously, as any other man action, food production has an impact on the environment. And according to several studies, food production has 25% impact on, on sustainability in the world, and most of it is coming from the greenhouse gases emission created by livestock. If we keep obviously producing protein the way that we have been doing until now, with with the growth of population that we are expecting and the land that we need to use, this will create an extra ten gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions. So obviously there are different ways of approaching this problem. We obviously have traditional meat that has made a fantastic job. In order to meet all this demand growth that we have been seeing in the last decades, and obviously it's going to be with us. They are still working on being very efficient. Okay, but there are other alternatives that have been worked on in the last decade. For example, plant-based protein that although has been with us for a long time, we have been able to create really attractive products that we can enjoy nowadays in the form of a burger, of a nugget, of a sausage. And they are becoming very, very popular. There are other sources like protein from insect, although nowadays mostly it is used to feed animals, but also it is used in different areas in the world to feed humans. Okay, algae protein is another one, and cultivated meat is the one that we focus at Biotech Foods. All these systems obviously are not perfect. I think I always like to say it's like energy. There is no one source of energy that is perfect. So what we like to do is to really create a balanced system, production system, that allows us to have a sustainable production of protein. For example, if we take plant-based protein, and soy and pea are the sources more used for this, okay? But also they have their drawbacks in terms of allergenicity. Most— I mean, there are many consumers that they cannot withstand soy, for example, or pea. And also they have some flavor that normally we do not like or enjoy when we want to have tasty products like meat products that we love. Okay. And also in the term, in case of the pea protein, if with the expected estimated growth that we expect for alternative protein, we will need 30% of all the pea protein produced in the world in order to meet that growth. So what we do is some cultivated meat. So what is cultivated meat about? What we basically do is we take one cell, yes, one cell from an animal. We work with land species, although this can be applied to seafood also. Okay, there is some different behavior in that case, but for land species, most of them behave the same way. So we work with bovine, pork, and chicken. And so you take the cell from the muscle. The muscle is the part that really interests us. Why? Because it's where the high biological content protein is. When I mean high biological content, that means that it has all the amino acids, essential amino acids that we need. Humans need to consume amino acids every day. There are some of them that we do not create and we need to consume them. In comparison to fat, you do not store them. Okay, so you have to to have them. So with that said, we just put them in equipment that we are very familiar with, like fermenters that are used to make wine, to make cheese, to make dairy products, okay? And what we do is we let them grow and let them fusionate into, into fiber and create meats, okay? And then that meat we can transform afterwards in order to create. And this can allow us to have a more sustainable system where the use of resources is much, much lower in terms of use of water, land, and creation of greenhouse gas emissions. There are obviously certain challenges that we are facing, okay? The industry— this field was created for the first time 6 years ago, and we are still working on facing those challenges. Those challenges obviously will make cultivated meat more or less successful depending on the regulation, on the consumer acceptance, And the technological challenges that we are facing now is most of the companies are working on the production scale that will allow us to bring the product into the market already. Okay, so we will be able to enjoy probably in two three years those products into the market. A whole value chain is being created in order to make this a reality. Startups cannot make everything by themselves. Okay, we need the industry to work with us. The meat industry is even involved in the production of this system. They recognize the challenges that we are facing, okay? And not only them, there are other industries that have been providing the biopharma industry where we take most of the technology that we employ. This will have an impact on price. In fact, price of cultivated meat has been decreasing at a faster pace than other technological innovations that we have seen in the past. Consumer acceptance. We always, you know, when we don't work directly on this, as consumers we all have a say in this and we say, well, I will eat this, you know, people call it synthetic meat or something like that. But reality is that although most of us still don't know it, yes, 50% of the population know about cultivated meat, Still, more than 50% are willing to eat it when they have it. Obviously, this affects more to younger generations that they are more ready really to go for it. Main reasons normally because it is more sustainable and because it allows animal welfare. Okay, and good thing this is a whole ecosystem created around the world. There are many companies that are working on this and All together, we are gonna make possible to bring cultivated meat into the table and make this a reality that will allow us to meet eight out of the seventeen sustainable development goals of the of the UN. So thank you very much for your attention, and we will be here for the answers. Thank you all.
