Paris-based PARIMA, a member of the EIC Scaling Club’s Agri & Food Tech market group, is positioning Europe at the forefront of a new phase in protein innovation.
Formed in October 2025 through Gourmey’s acquisition of Vital Meat, the French company develops scalable systems to produce high-quality animal products directly from cells, starting with duck and chicken. PARIMA’s ambition spans premium dining, broader food markets, nutrition and other sectors where sustainable animal production can help meet rising global demand.
Cultivated meat for the good of the planet, people and animals
PARIMA’s technology is built around cultivated meat production: animal cells are selected, banked and grown under sterile, controlled conditions in bioreactors, using food-safe culture media rather than raising whole animals.
The company’s roots go back to Gourmey, a start-up founded in Paris in 2019 by Nicolas Morin-Forest, Dr Victor Sayous and Antoine Davydoff. Gourmey set out to create restaurant-grade meats directly from animal cells, combining expertise in food science, bioprocess engineering and stem cell biology. Its first focus was cultivated duck, including a cultivated foie gras product designed for chefs and restaurants looking for high-quality alternatives to conventional production.
The merger with Vital Meat starts a new phase for cultivated protein in Europe. After years of scientific validation, the sector is moving towards consolidation, regulatory progress and industrial scale-up. PARIMA brings together Gourmey’s full-stack industrial platform and premium cultivated duck products with Vital Meat’s poultry cell-line technology and Nantes infrastructure, including 2,000-litre bioreactor capacity.
The combined company also holds over 15 patent families and more than 70 patent applications, one of the most advanced intellectual property portfolios in the cultivated food sector.
Top chefs' advisory board
Gourmey had already reached several milestones before the creation of PARIMA. In 2022, it raised a €48 million Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, described at the time as the world’s largest Series A round for a cultivated meat start-up. The financing was intended to support a 46,000-square-foot commercial production facility and research and development centre in Paris, described as Europe’s largest cultivated meat hub, and to expand the company’s team and product portfolio.
Regulatory progress soon followed. In July 2024, Gourmey requested market access approval in five key markets: Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Union. The company became the first to request novel food approval for cultivated foods in the EU, with its cultivated duck product aimed at foie gras enthusiasts, chefs and restaurants.
The company also built a strong culinary validation strategy. In December 2024, Gourmey launched what it described as the cultivated meat sector’s first culinary advisory board, bringing together three Michelin-starred chefs. Their role was to provide feedback on the product’s taste, texture and use in fine dining, helping the company align scientific development with the expectations of chefs and consumers.
From Europe to Singapore to the world
The most significant milestone came after the formation of PARIMA. On 28 October 2025, PARIMA became the first European company to obtain regulatory approval to market a cultivated meat product. The approval was granted in Singapore for cultivated chicken, following a review by the Singapore Food Agency. PARIMA described the approval as the first milestone in a wider regulatory pipeline, with several other active filings across major international markets.
This approval gives PARIMA a stronger platform for international growth. Singapore has become a reference market for cultivated foods, combining strict food safety requirements with a dynamic food innovation ecosystem. PARIMA’s approval there provides a launchpad for its broader Asian strategy and strengthens its position as it pursues approvals across Europe, Asia and North America.
In April 2026, PARIMA became the first company worldwide to obtain cultivated food approval for two different animal species, duck and chicken. PARIMA’s CEO Nicolas Morin-Forest put this into perspective:
“In a sector moving from promise to proof, repeatable regulatory success is becoming a clear marker of platform strength. By securing approvals of two species within a few months, we have demonstrated the potential scale of our platform and core technology. Our focus now is commercialisation to deliver high-quality and safe products at meaningful volumes.”
PARIMA’s story is therefore not only about cultivated duck or chicken. It is about Europe’s ability to turn scientific excellence into industrial leadership in one of the most complex markets in food.
For the EIC Scaling Club, PARIMA represents the kind of European deep tech scale-up the Club was created to support: a company working at the intersection of science, industrial scale-up, regulation and global market creation.
About the EIC Scaling Club
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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