The Cultured Hub accelerates alternative ingredient production

The Cultured Hub has announced a major expansion of its service offering with the addition of plant cell culturing capabilities, broadening its activities beyond cultivated meat to support the fast-growing field of alternative ingredient production.

Originally established as a joint venture between Migros, Givaudan, and Bühler Group to accelerate cellular agriculture technologies, The Cultured Hub will now extend its infrastructure and expertise to plant cell-based processes. The move comes as global supply chains for high-value crops such as cocoa, coffee, and citrus face mounting pressures from climate volatility, rising commodity prices, and agricultural constraints.

To mark the milestone, the Hub hosted the first Cultured Plant Cell Event 2025, bringing together start-ups, corporate leaders, and researchers. The event explored how plant cell culture can complement traditional agriculture by enabling controlled, year-round production of key plant compounds, independent of farmland, weather, pests, or disease.

Ian Roberts, chief technology officer at Bühler Group, said: “Plant cell cultivation represents an important new frontier in sustainable food and ingredient production. Many of the same challenges we see in cultivated meat – scaling, reducing cost, and ensuring quality – apply here. By expanding into plant cell culture, The Cultured Hub is giving the food industry a unique platform to explore climate-resilient ingredient pipelines.”

Start-ups including Ergo Bioscience, Coffeesai, Phyton Biotech, Spicy Cells, Kokomodo, Food Brewer, Celleste Bio, and GALY presented innovations ranging from cocoa biomass grown in bioreactors to stabilized coffee cell lines. These contributions highlighted the diversity of approaches underway globally and the potential for plant cell culture to stabilize ingredient availability.

Yannick Jones, CEO of The Cultured Hub, emphasized the collaborative nature of the initiative: “Demand for alternative, climate-resilient ingredients is growing rapidly, but the field still faces high costs and technical challenges. By providing shared bioprocess infrastructure and a neutral platform, we enable start-ups and corporates to scale more efficiently and unlock the next wave of innovation.”

The event also featured a keynote from Professor Dr Ing. Regine Eibl-Schindler of ZHAW, who introduced the emerging discipline of microbotanics – the cultivation of plant cells to produce targeted metabolites, flavours, and functional compounds with precision. Philippe Jutras, founder of the Plant Cell Institute, added that while scaling remains the bottleneck, alignment between researchers, start-ups, and industry is crucial to move from promising lab results to commercial impact.

With this expansion, The Cultured Hub aims to provide access to advanced bioprocess equipment, expert process development support, and collaborative infrastructure, helping innovators bridge the gap from lab-scale experiments to pilot production. The initiative underscores the growing momentum behind plant cell culture as a credible sourcing platform for sustainable, climate-resilient ingredients.