Home appliance grows ingredients within a week

In Otaniemi, Finland, VTT researchers are developing a home appliance that will grow ingredients from plant cells inside a week.

The first plant cell incubator prototype, CellPod, has been 3D-printed and is already producing harvests of Finnish berries.

Using bioreactors to grow plant cells is not a new idea but achieving harvests within a week is.

Lauri Reuter, VTT research scientist, said, “Urbanisation and the environmental burden caused by agriculture are creating the need to develop new ways of producing food — CellPod is one of them. It may soon offer consumers a new and exciting way of producing local food in their own homes.”

The tabletop-sized appliance resembles a design lamp and is being developed in collaboration with consumers to facilitate the commercialisation phase.

The CellPod concept is based on growing undifferentiated plant cells of a plant rather than a whole plant. These cells contain the plant’s entire genetic potential so can produce the same healthy compounds — such as antioxidants and vitamins — as the whole plant. Currently the cloudberry culture has a similar nutritional profile to the berry itself, but the flavour needs more development as it is mild and neutral.

So far, VTT has used cells from its own culture collection to grow Arctic bramble cells, cloudberry cells and stone bramble cells in the CellPod. The bioreactor also enables the production of healthy food from plants other than traditional food crops, such as birch. The development of tailored cell lines is also possible, in which case nutritional characteristics can be developed according to need. On the other hand, the optimisation of growth conditions, such as light and temperature, can also affect the compounds produced by the cells — just like in nature.

VTT’s online platform Owela allows consumers to have input into the concept.