PARIMA, Bluu and Mewery founders set out new routes to cultivated meat commercialization

Cultivated meat companies are reworking how they reach customers, with founders from PARIMA, Bluu and Mewery telling the Cultured Meat Symposium in Amsterdam that shared production infrastructure, more specific product benefits and alternative markets are becoming central to their commercial plans.

• PARIMA is pursuing premium products through shared manufacturing.
• Bluu is targeting personal care before food.
• Mewery is seeking public funding and preparing for market entry.

“I think we are all ingredient companies first and foremost,” says Nicolas Morin-Forest, Co-founder and CEO of PARIMA.

Speaking during “Where Is Cultivated Meat Really in 2026?”, Morin-Forest describes a business in which cultivated cells can become ingredients for different finished products, developed either by the producer itself or by food manufacturing customers. PARIMA’s cultivated foie gras is one application of that ingredient platform.

The discussion, moderated by Jo Anne Shatkin, Founder of Vireo Advisors, brings together companies pursuing different commercial routes. PARIMA is concentrating on premium food, Bluu is prioritizing marine ingredients for personal care, and Mewery is developing a co-cultivation platform combining animal cells and microalgae.

All three founders describe substantial technical progress. Their accounts also show how much commercial planning now depends on conserving capital, securing manufacturing partners and choosing customers who can pay for what the technology currently delivers.

For Morin-Forest, the industry’s original questions concerned whether cultivation worked, whether production could reach useful costs and volumes, whether regulators would provide a route to market, and whether consumers would buy the products.

He says the first three have been at least partly addressed. PARIMA obtained its first Singapore approval in April 2026, while its collaboration with Australian cultivated meat company Vow demonstrated production at ton scale.

Morin-Forest says PARIMA produced more than two metric tons of finished-product equivalent. That volume, he explains, changes the conversations it can have with potential customers. Food manufacturers can receive substantial samples, including shipments of 50kg of biomass, and begin working with the material in their own applications.

He argues that investor perceptions have not fully caught up with that progress. Earlier enthusiasm arrived when the sector had much less to demonstrate; companies now have more production experience and products to offer, while funding has become harder to secure.

PARIMA’s response includes retaining its focus on premium products while changing its approach to infrastructure. Its processes are designed to work with standard equipment, allowing it to use capacity operated by other organizations.

Morin-Forest names Vow and several emerging shared production providers as examples of the facilities becoming available. He also calls for companies to consider how far they can standardize processes so that manufacturing lines require fewer adjustments between users.

The question from investors has changed accordingly. A large factory funded ahead of revenue is harder to justify when investors want to know how much capital a company needs before it can support itself.

“How much until you become self-sufficient as a company and cash flow positive,” Morin-Forest says.

PARIMA’s underlying technology choices remain similar, including its commitment to growing cells in suspension. The adaptation is in how that technology is deployed and financed.

Morin-Forest says the company’s cultivated foie gras is profitable at the production volumes and selling prices it can currently achieve. His comments concern the economics of that product at those volumes; he does not present them as a claim that PARIMA as a whole is cash flow positive.

For Bluu Founder and CEO Sebastian Rakers, the commercial calculation has led to an earlier focus on personal care ingredients.

Rakers describes the scientific achievements of cultivated meat and seafood companies as considerable for such a young industry. But he also acknowledges that development has taken longer than he once expected, and that he would now express some earlier timelines more cautiously.

Bluu’s review of its business in 2025 considered the combined challenges of scale, price and market access. Regulatory uncertainty was particularly difficult to accommodate in a commercial plan.

Having submitted its Singapore dossier, the company faced uncertainty over when approval might arrive. Rakers describes the difficulty of managing a business when the remaining wait could potentially be measured in months or years.

The regulatory work also helped identify another opportunity. Characterizing its salmon and trout cells and their output revealed molecules with potential value in personal care, including peptides.

Rakers says that market offers more attractive prices for certain active ingredients and lower regulatory barriers than food. It also allows Bluu to work through partners while continuing to develop the cell cultivation technology it ultimately intends to use for seafood.

The company has worked closely with Cultivate at Scale in the Netherlands. Rakers says the process can be transferred into other production facilities, supporting a model built around partnerships.

The earlier ambition of creating a major consumer brand required resources that Bluu did not have. Selling ingredients into another market provides a different route to revenue.

“Everything that we are now building for this particular market also pays towards the food market, that we nevertheless will address, but just later on,” Rakers says.

Mewery Founder and CEO Roman Lauš describes a company attempting to commercialize with much less funding than some of the sector’s earlier entrants.

Lauš says Mewery has raised approximately €4 million (US$4.5 million). The Czech company is combining animal cells with microalgae in a co-cultivation process and hopes to bring its first product to Singapore in 2027.

He credits CTO Moria Shimoni with helping develop a technology that can progress with a smaller capital requirement. But he is equally clear that limited funding leaves companies under pressure to demonstrate a commercial use for their work.

“We need to bring anything to market to prove that this technology has place in this world,” Lauš says.

Mewery has been pursuing European funding and working with the Czech government on potential support for alternative proteins and biotechnology. Lauš says those efforts began well before the latest deterioration in venture funding.

He also describes work toward a Czech framework for cultivated meat tastings, while emphasizing that approval was still pending at the time of the discussion.

For Lauš, surviving companies have developed teams and technology through difficult conditions, making them potentially attractive investment opportunities. He argues that the remaining funding requirement should be considered alongside that accumulated work.

Access to partners also changes the requirements for new companies. Shared facilities and experienced collaborators can reduce the need to construct a dedicated factory before production processes have been demonstrated.

Consumer demand, however, remains a question that manufacturing progress alone cannot answer.

Morin-Forest argues that companies need to identify benefits for specific buyers. In PARIMA’s case, chefs are central both to product development and to explaining its value.

“In our case, the chefs are the key pillar,” he says.

Chefs discuss how an ingredient performs in the kitchen, what they can create with it and what advantages it offers over an existing product. For cultivated foie gras, Morin-Forest identifies consistent quality as a particularly important benefit.

He says variation in conventional foie gras can create losses for chefs, making predictable performance commercially valuable. Sustainability and ethical arguments may support the product, but they do not replace the need to offer something useful to the customer.

Lauš sees scope for developing entirely new foods from cultivated ingredients, including products with different nutritional properties and forms. He also acknowledges the difficulty of introducing an unfamiliar product without a recognizable reference point.

Rakers argues for a wider range of commercial applications, including personal care, pet food and food. Within food, he says products do not need to contain only cultivated cells to provide a satisfying eating experience.

Public tastings are important to that process, he adds. Familiarity needs to extend to people outside the companies developing the products and the investors financing them.

The founders also describe a European policy environment that offers research expertise and manufacturing partners but still presents obstacles to market access.

Morin-Forest warns against treating cultivated meat separately from other food technologies for political reasons. He urges plant-based and precision fermentation businesses to support a broader approach to food biotechnology, particularly in discussions around the EU Biotech Act.

At the time of the panel, he says PARIMA’s European dossier is progressing with EFSA and identifies the subsequent risk management stage as a priority for 2027. He describes constructive engagement with the agency while recognizing that the political decisions following scientific assessment require separate work.

Rakers points to the Netherlands’ willingness to create opportunities for collaboration and demonstration. He welcomes greater recognition of cultivated meat in Germany’s technology agenda, while calling for faster action.

An audience question on environmental performance produces more qualified answers than broad sustainability claims.

Morin-Forest says PARIMA is finalizing peer review of its latest life cycle assessment and does not share numerical results. He identifies the energy mix and the complexity of culture media as important determinants of performance.

Lauš says Mewery has not yet completed its assessment. He reports a co-culture biomass yield of about 300g per liter and hopes that productivity will support favorable results, but presents that as an expectation.

Rakers describes an internal assessment of part of Bluu’s process, supported by German government funding, in which system sanitation accounted for the largest share of energy consumption. That finding gives the company a specific area for further engineering work.

The discussion also returns to the language companies use with regulators, politicians and customers.

Morin-Forest says PARIMA has become more selective about public advocacy, working to build support without necessarily asking political stakeholders to make public declarations. Technical descriptions of the cultivated ingredient can help in regulatory conversations, even when they would be unsuitable for explaining a finished dish to a chef.

“Sometimes making too much noise is counterproductive,” he says.

For the customer, the product still has to communicate what it offers. For the regulator, the ingredient needs a clear technical description.

“So what we are getting approved and regulated in all of our target markets are biomass cells as an ingredient,” Morin-Forest says, explaining that PARIMA or its customers can then use that material in different applications.

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