Scalable Scaffold Materials for Structured Cultivated Meat

Cultivated meat (CM) seeks to decouple meat production from animal agriculture, but producing structured products that consumers recognize as whole-cut meat remains both difficult and central to the field's ambitions. Scaffolds are key to this goal, providing architecture, cell-adhesion sites, and instructive cues required to organize cells into texturally mimetic tissue. To date, CM scaffold research has largely borrowed from tissue engineering, which optimizes for therapeutic function and does not account for the constraints that define a food product: edibility, low cost, and large scale. Here, we review scalable scaffold materials and fabrication methods for structured CM through this food-first lens. We identify relevant elements of the native muscle microenvironment and assess how these characteristics have been recapitulated. We then evaluate the major classes of scaffold materials, including those of synthetic, animal, plant, fungal, and microbial origin, as well as waste-stream-derived materials, and compare their biological suitability and scalability. We organize fabrication methods by the biological function they address: cell expansion, alignment, bulk structure, and multi-material assembly, treating mass transport as a constraint that cuts across these methods rather than a separate function. Throughout, we emphasize that consumer perception of meat quality is driven by architecture rather than physiological function, and throughput and cost determine commercial viability. We conclude by identifying critical gaps that warrant scientific focus to bring structured CM to market.