The Future of Protein Production 2025: Hydrosol’s approach to texturizing cultured meat cells
20 Nov 2025 | Hydrosol
Cultivated meat cells today can behave more like high-water, loose ingredients than structured meat. Germany-based texturizing specialist Hydrosol is testing how its systems can firm and shape these cells in hybrid products, helping plant-based analogs achieve more authentic meat-like qualities. Dr. Katharina Burdorf, head of product management, notes that fat type plays a critical role in creating a realistic appearance and bite.
This is Missy Green with Food Ingredients first.
I'm here with Dr.
Katerina Bergdorf, who is from Hydrasal.
Welcome, Katerina.
Katerina gave a presentation yesterday about engineering the perfect bite, and could you tell us what was that about?
Yes, engineering the perfect bite, but not the perfect bite for any kind of food product, the perfect bite for a very specific kind of food.
So I've talked about.
Hydrocooids and texture innovations for cultivated meat, so products containing cultivated biomass, so-called hybrid products, in the end, so a bridging technology in between of plant-based products and maybe some point in time fully cultivated products.
So cultivated meat, it's essentially meat cells.
So why do they require extra texturization?
Yeah, you can imagine the biomass that you get for the production is not a piece of meat or something, so it's quite watery, slurry, you can say.
Sometimes I compare it with a with a soup.
It depends, but it has a high water content, so it's not as you would imagine a fibrous meat structure or something because it's only one component.
That you have a meat like the muscle fibers in a water base or cultivated fat as a as an ingredient in thee, so you don't get the final meat product out of it so you need some structurization and some ingredients that also work together with this water in the biomass to make in the.
And the final hybrid meat product out of this.
So you're basically taking individual components of proteins and fats and then you're having to construct them together with hydrocolloids, correct?
So as our business model is about stabilizing and texturing systems and we have know-how and various kinds of food applications from traditional meat but also to plant-based meat.
So we've built a spin-off plan in years.
5 years ago we used this application and ingredients know-how to formulate the perfect recipe for this kind of products and what I've mentioned in my talk yesterday as , it sounds quite easy like you blend some ingredients, you form them, and then you maybe pre-freeze fry and then you have a final product.
So that's that's the theory, right?
But.
All the ingredients, they interact with each other, so the plant-based ingredients interact with each other.
They also interact with the cultivated biomass.
Cultivated biomass might also interact with the surrounding or also the plant-based proteins in the end, like with oxygen and so on.
So everything that you put inside has an influence on the final product, and this is what I've shown.
I had a specific.
Slide with some pictures where I've shown how we've been working on a hybrid patty, a burger patty, and compared to purely plant-based burger patties depending on the fat source.
So there was a picture with some sunflower oil, there was one with cultivated fat that we've used, and one with coconut oil, and you've really seen that the base.
Structure and everything is totally fine from the stabilization part and everything, but to fine tune the product, it was essential which kind of fat you use, for instance, and of course the dosage and everything is also an important point, but in the end my message was also to show if we add a specific amount of cultivated fat and a purely plant-based product.
We see is that we have a much more meat-like structure.
It's juicier.
It feels different, and it looks different, so I cannot show you the picture now, but that was something that I've heard afterwards.
Wow, that was really convincing.
So people don't know about this yet so much about this ingredient interactions.
