Cellular Agriculture Netherlands (CAN) has officially joined Planet B.io as a member, marking another step in strengthening the Dutch biotech ecosystem. As the national organisation dedicated to accelerating cellular agriculture, CAN brings together researchers, startups, industry and public partners to help innovative food technologies move from research to real-world impact.
For CAN chair Maresa Oosterman, the partnership was an obvious next step. "Cellular agriculture is still a very young sector. It's ambitious, but also vulnerable," she says. "No single organisation can build this industry on its own. We need to work together, strengthen each other and build a strong ecosystem. Planet B.io already represents exactly that kind of network, so joining their network with ours was really a no-brainer."
Building on Dutch strengths
The Netherlands has earned an international reputation as one of the pioneers in cellular agriculture. From the world's first cultivated burger to decades of expertise in precision fermentation, the country has built a strong scientific and industrial foundation. "Innovation is in our DNA," Oosterman explains. "The Netherlands has always found ways to produce food more efficiently and sustainably. Cellular agriculture is a logical next step in that tradition."
CAN's mission is to build an ecosystem to foster commercial success by investing in public research, education, talent development and shared scale-up infrastructure. Thanks to support from the Dutch National Growth Fund, significant progress has already been made. But according to Oosterman, important challenges remain. "We need more public research to accelerate breakthroughs, we need to bridge the remaining scale-up gap towards commercial production, and we need a faster and more predictable regulatory pathway in Europe. Those are the priorities for the coming years."
"No single organisation can build this industry on its own. We need to work together, strengthen each other and build a strong ecosystem."
The power of ecosystems
For CAN, joining Planet B.io is about much more than connecting with another organisation. It is about connecting networks. "The real added value of Planet B.io is its community," says Oosterman. "Not just the companies and organisations on campus, but also the combined network that comes with it. Together with our network, we have a much greater reach and can respond much faster to new opportunities."
She points to the rapidly changing biotech landscape, where new funding opportunities, policy initiatives and collaboration requests appear regularly. "No individual organisation can keep track of everything anymore. By sharing knowledge, informing each other and working together, we can make the most of the current momentum around biotech in the Netherlands."
Looking ahead
The partnership also creates opportunities to strengthen collaboration beyond the Dutch ecosystem, particularly in advocacy and European policy.
"I would love to see our collaboration become a well-oiled machine," Oosterman says. "When opportunities arise, whether it's a funding call, a policy consultation or a joint initiative, we should already know how to find each other and act together. That kind of coordination will make our entire ecosystem stronger."
For Planet B.io, CAN’s membership adds an important voice from the cellular agriculture field to the community. It creates more room for cross-sector conversations with industrial biotech companies, scale-up partners and policymakers, to accelerate innovation and help promising cellular agriculture technologies successfully make the journey from laboratory to market.