Gourmey acquires Vital Meat and forms PARIMA to industrialize cultivated food
Building a next-generation food company.
Building a next-generation food company
The story of cultivated meat has so far been one of scientific triumph and industrial constraint. Several startups have proven that animal proteins can be grown from cells rather than animals, yet few have crossed the chasm from lab bench to factory floor. The bottleneck is less about taste and technology and is more about scale and regulations.
This month, our portfolio company Gourmey acquired Vital Meat to form PARIMA, a new European champion for cultivated proteins and foods. The merger brings together two complementary pioneers: Gourmey, known for its work in high-value duck and poultry cell lines, and Vital Meat, focused on scalable cell-based chicken production. Together, they now control the critical layers of the cultivated stack, from cell biology to bioprocess design to regulatory readiness, while moving beyond scaled R&D into genuine food manufacturing. Its Paris facility, one of the largest of its kind worldwide, anchors a new phase of industrialization: large-volume production, supply chain integration, and cost parity with high-value meats.
What’s behind the announcement
PARIMA combines Gourmey’s full-stack industrial platform, including premium cultivated duck validated by Michelin-starred chefs and independently verified production costs below €7/kg, with Vital Meat’s Nantes infrastructure, namely its 2,000‑liter bioreactor capacity and advanced avian cell lines developed from ~25 years of Groupe Grimaud’s avian cell research. The combined platform is supported by 15+ patent families and 70+ patent applications, and a regulatory portfolio of nine active filings across major regions. PARIMA’s near-term goal is to become the first cultivated food company positioned for regulatory approval of two species (duck and chicken), with applications that span premium dining to large-scale B2B ingredients.
A milestone for Europe’s bioeconomy
Just as the AI industry is integrating vertically around compute and data, cultivated food is consolidating around production infrastructure and process efficiency. The winners will not be the first to demonstrate a prototype, but the first to make a tonne.
At Air Street, we’ve backed Gourmey since its early days because we believed that cultivated food would follow the same curve as other deep technology sectors: a burst of discovery, a period of consolidation, and then a race to scale. PARIMA embodies that transition: from a scientific breakthrough to an industrial one.
While you’re here: another milestone with Mission Barns hitting retail!
Alongside PARIMA’s formation, another Air Street portfolio company reached a landmark: Mission Barns has begun selling cultivated pork products to consumers in the U.S. Following an FDA “no questions” letter for its cultivated pork fat in March 2025 and USDA clearance in July 2025, Mission Barns launched with Bay Area restaurant partner Fiorella and is executing targeted retail releases. Notably, its cultivated pork meatballs are making a supermarket debut at Berkeley Bowl in the East Bay, one of the first times cultivated meat has been sold at a U.S. grocer.