Funding Philosophy

New Harvest defines cellular agriculture research as projects creating traditionally animal-sourced foods from cell culture. We fund research projects in the following target focus areas: cells, scaffolds, media, bioreactors, and food systems.

Together, our focus areas constitute the building blocks of cell-cultured meat. They are left intentionally vague in order to cast the widest net into the world of pre-competitive research.

Each shape represents one of our grantees’ projects, with the apex of the “petal” indicating what percentage of a specific project focuses on a given target focus area. Densely colored regions represent focus areas being researched by many grantees. (last updated 12/30/2020).

New Harvest does not require prospective grantees to have a specific technical background. We encourage applicants from engineering and both the life and physical sciences to bring their unique expertise to the New Harvest research community.

Preference is given to applicants whose projects seek to answer fundamental questions relevant to our target focus areas.

New Harvest is committed to open science in order to advance cellular agriculture as quickly and equitably as possible. We fund cellular agriculture research around the globe and want the results of our research to be shared globally as well.

Because openness in research is a core value for New Harvest, all grantees are expected to demonstrate a commitment to openness during their time as a New Harvest scholar. This means publishing findings in peer-reviewed, open access journals and taking efforts to ensure their work remains as accessible as possible.

Global distribution of New Harvest funded research projects (last updated 12/30/2020).