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  • Review Article
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Biomaterials in cellular agriculture and plant-based foods for the future

Nature Reviews Materials volume 10, pages 500–518 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Alternative food products are needed to address the most pressing challenges faced by the food industry: growing global food demand, health concerns, animal welfare, food security and environmental sustainability. Future foods are defined as foods with scalability and sustainability potential owing to rapidly advancing technological developments in their production systems. Key areas of study for future foods include cellular agriculture and plant-based systems, which include biomaterials as key ingredients or as structural components to impart texture, support cell growth and metabolism, and provide nutrients and organoleptic factors to food products. This Review discusses current requirements, options and processing approaches for biomaterials with utility in future foods. We focus on two main approaches: cellular agriculture wherein the cells are the key component for food (with the biomaterials utilized to support the cells via adherence and/or for texture) and plant-based foods wherein acellular plant-derived biomaterials are the food components. In both cases, the same fundamental challenges apply for the biomaterials: achieving utility at scale and low cost while meeting food safety requirements. Other considerations for biomaterials for future foods are also addressed, including sustainability, modelling, consumer acceptance, nutrition, regulatory status and safety considerations to highlight the path ahead. This emerging field of biomaterials for future foods offers a new generation of biomaterial systems that can positively impact human health, environmental sustainability and animal welfare. Although scaling these biomaterial sources cost-effectively presents a major challenge, substantial progress is being made, and opportunities to establish supply chains are already underway.

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Fig. 1: Overview of biomaterial inputs and required properties for the development of future food products.
Fig. 2: Biomaterial scaffolds.
Fig. 3: Biomaterial scaffolding for future foods.
Fig. 4: Factors influencing the nutritional properties of future foods, including macronutrient and micronutrient properties and digestibility.
Fig. 5: LCA and TEA of biomaterial scaffolds for cell-cultivated food production.
Fig. 6: Regulatory landscape for future foods.
Fig. 7: Timeline for major events related to the development of future foods.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the following organizations for supporting resources that aided in the preparation of this Review: the US Department of Agriculture (2021-69012-35978), the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, New Harvest, the Good Food Institute and the National Science Foundation, as well as their respective students for their foundational research efforts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Edward B. Gordon, Nicole Tichenor Blackstone & David L. Kaplan

  2. Department of Food Science and Technology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Inyoung Choi, Begum Koysuren & Nitin Nitin

  3. Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Inyoung Choi, Begum Koysuren & Nitin Nitin

  4. Department of Food Science and Technology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Armaghan Amanipour, Champ Jones & Reza Ovissipour

  5. Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yiwen Hu & Markus J. Buehler

  6. Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yiwen Hu & Markus J. Buehler

  7. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA

    Amin Nikkhah & Nicole Tichenor Blackstone

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Gordon, E.B., Choi, I., Amanipour, A. et al. Biomaterials in cellular agriculture and plant-based foods for the future. Nat Rev Mater 10, 500–518 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-025-00800-7

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