California-based cultivated-seafood company BlueNalu has signed a Letter of Intent with animal nutrition and aqua feed producer Nutreco to set up and scale up a food-grade cell feed supply chain for cultivated seafood manufacturing. The partnership will entail initiatives to reduce cell feed costs by moving from a pharma-grade to a food-grade ingredient supply. Nutreco will focus on developing its food-grade supply chain infrastructure to be in line with BlueNalu’s production phases.

To meet food-grade regulatory requirements in BlueNalu’s planned launch markets, the partners will establish specifications and metrics for raw material inputs used for the production of BlueNalu’s cultivated seafood products. BlueNalu plans to launch its first commercial product, a premium bluefin tuna toro in the US, Europe, and Japan, following regulatory approval.

Analyst QuickTake : Earlier this month, Dutch cell-cultured meat producer Mosa Meat announced a partnership with Nutreco to develop a cell feed supply chain that can expedite production and scalability while reducing cost. The high cost of pharma-grade cell feed, which is the nutrient-rich medium in which cells are grown, is the biggest challenge faced by cell-cultured meat startups when achieving cost parity with traditional meats. The company claims that cells grown in food-grade feed exhibit similar cell density to cells fed with pharma-grade material. Mosa and Nutreco estimate the use of food-grade feed rather than pharma-grade feed can lower the costs of basal media by a factor of at least 100x . If this approach is commercially viable and scalable, it will be a significant milestone in scaling cell-cultured meats to the mass market.