Why Not Zaanstad? The Case for Cultured Meat at Industrial Scale
There is something almost too obvious about the idea of a cultured meat plant in Zaanstad.
Zaanstad is a municipality of around 160,000 inhabitants just north of Amsterdam, centred on Zaandam and stretching along the river Zaan in one of the Netherlands’ oldest industrial regions. It is also my hometown.
Few places in Europe have spent so long turning global agricultural commodities into food at industrial scale. If cultured meat is going to make the difficult transition from laboratory and pilot plant to actual food industry, Zaanstad should at least be asking what role it wants to play. Not by declaring cultured meat either inevitable or impossible, but by making itself one of the places where that future can be tested, scaled and, eventually, made to work.
An industrial food region
Zaanstad and the surrounding region have spent centuries turning global agricultural flows into food. It is a place where food has long been industrial: milled, pressed, processed, refined, packaged and shipped. It still is.
The region’s industry remains strongly dominated by food production, even if today it looks less like Verkade nostalgia and more like B2B process technology. According to Zaan Food Makers, the cluster includes 16 industrial food companies and nine international R&D centres, with around 7,000 direct and 21,000 indirect jobs. That is substantial in a municipality with approximately 73,450 jobs. Direct added value is estimated at €1.5 billion, with another €2.4 billion indirectly.
And this is not one industry making one product, but a variety of companies producing cocoa products, vegetable oils and fats, ingredients, confectionery and consumer products ranging from chocolate to mayonnaise.
So if cultured meat moves from start-ups, venture-capital slide decks and optimistic laboratory photos towards actual industrial production, Zaanstad is at least a plausible place for that next step. Not because it is shiny. Precisely because it is not.
From laboratory to industry
Cultured meat is animal tissue produced without raising and slaughtering an animal. A small sample of animal cells is multiplied in a nutrient-rich medium and grown in bioreactors. The result is not a plant-based imitation of meat, but animal cells produced through a different production system. In principle, that means producing meat without animal suffering and with much less pressure on land, water and ecosystems.
The technology is no longer science fiction. But neither is it yet a normal food industry. That distinction matters.
There are tastings, pilot plants, approvals in a small number of countries and endless claims about what comes next. There are also high costs, unresolved scaling questions, difficult energy balances, public-perception challenges, bioreactor constraints and persistent questions about texture, flavour and production efficiency.
In the European Union, cultured meat still has to pass through the novel food procedure before it can be sold. No cultured meat product is currently approved for sale in the EU. The Netherlands does, however, allow controlled tastings before full market approval.
That does not yet make the case for building a giant meat factory tomorrow. It does make the case for asking whether Zaanstad should try to become the place where industrial scale-up happens.
Zaanstad already has much of what a future food-production system would need: process-industry skills, food-safety knowledge, technical maintenance, logistics, port access, packaging, ingredients, operators, engineers, relevant education and, perhaps most importantly, a culture that understands that food production is not just branding. It is also pipes, valves, trucks, odour, energy contracts, industrial safety and permits, and ugly big buildings.
A cultured meat plant would therefore not be an alien object dropped into a picturesque Dutch town, which Zaanstad is not in the first place. It would be another layer in a long history of making food at industrial scale, and potentially a basis for future economic growth.
A hedge against an uncertain food economy
There is also a more strategic argument. The existing food economy is not as stable as it sometimes looks. Many of the commodities on which it depends are increasingly exposed to climate change, land-use pressures, biodiversity loss, labour and human-rights questions, geopolitics and changing consumer expectations. Cocoa, soy, coffee and palm oil are all becoming more politically and ecologically loaded, and several of these commodities are central to the region’s existing food industry.
Cultured meat will not magically solve these problems. But it could become one element in a broader protein transition, alongside plant-based products, precision fermentation, better farming, less waste and, unavoidably, eating fewer animals.
For Zaanstad, the question is therefore not whether cultured meat is morally pure, technically certain or commercially guaranteed. It is none of those things. The question is whether a region with this much food-industrial history should ignore one of the more serious attempts to redesign animal-protein production, particularly when parts of its existing food economy are themselves becoming more vulnerable to climate change, ecological constraints and geopolitical disruption.
The answer is probably no.
But the how matters.
A cultured meat plant in Zaanstad should not be sold as the inevitable future, because very little is inevitable except grid congestion, spatial-planning hurdles and disappointing public-participation processes. It should instead be approached as a serious industrial experiment: a scale-up facility connecting the regional food cluster with Dutch and European cellular agriculture, vocational and technical education, energy-system planning and public debate.
The strengths are real. Zaanstad has a credible food-industry identity, relevant skills, logistics, experience with industrial land use and a story that does not need to be invented by a branding agency. The opportunity is also real: future-proofing part of the food cluster, attracting new technical jobs and giving the region a role in the protein transition that is practical rather than preachy.
The weaknesses are equally real. Cultured meat remains expensive, technically immature at scale, energy-sensitive and poorly understood by much of the public. The phrase “lab meat” will do damage every time the sector overpromises. And Zaanstad is not exactly short of competing claims on space, energy infrastructure and environmental capacity.
The threats are not minor either. EU approval can take time. Investor enthusiasm has already cooled from the earlier hype years. Political resistance to alternative proteins is growing in some countries. And if the energy system is neither clean nor reliable, the climate case becomes much weaker. Producing meat without animals but with a large fossil-energy footprint would be a very classic way of solving one problem by quietly enlarging another.
This is, in the end, an argument for industrial policy at regional scale: start from what a place is already good at, identify where the industry might move next, and try to get there before everyone else does.
Just go for it
There is a sensible strategy here. It is also the boring one.
The municipality could take a modest but active role: bring the relevant parties together, understand the spatial and energy conditions, support feasibility work, connect education and labour-market partners, and make sure that permitting, infrastructure and local legitimacy are dealt with early and speedily. It is careful, reasonable and probably what most strategy documents would recommend. It may even work.
But there is another option. And it probably fits Zaanstad better: just go for it.
Set the ambition to get the first industrial-scale cultured meat plant in the European Union to Zaanstad. Maybe even the first in the world. Find the companies that are closest to scaling, bring in the regional food industry, investors, technical partners and government, identify a site, sort out the infrastructure questions and make clear that Zaanstad wants this plant.
That is obviously riskier. The technology may not scale as expected. Costs may remain too high. Another production model may win. But industrial regions are not built by waiting until all uncertainty has disappeared. The Zaanstreek became a food-industrial powerhouse because people built mills, factories, ports and infrastructure and took risks at scale, not because they first completed a careful regional innovation strategy.
And, frankly, it is a much better pitch. “Zaanstad wants to explore its potential role in cellular agriculture” is sensible and almost entirely forgettable. “Build Europe’s first industrial cultured meat plant in Zaanstad” is not.
Zaanstad does not need to bet the regional economy on cultured meat. But it can make a serious attempt to secure one important part of the next generation of food industry. For a region that has been industrialising and reinventing food production for centuries, trying to be first seems a better fit than carefully preparing to follow.