Tissue Culture With Healthy Cells: Full Process Explained

Tissue culture using healthy cells is a laboratory technique that grows plant or animal cells in a controlled, sterile environment outside their original organism. It is one of the most important tools in modern food production, feeding the global supply of bananas, potatoes, strawberries, and now, increasingly, cultivated meat.

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The scale of this technology is hard to overstate. According to the USDA Agricultural Research Service, tissue culture micropropagation supplies millions of virus-free planting stocks annually for commercial food crops worldwide. The technique keeps entire food supply chains disease-free in ways conventional propagation cannot match.

This article walks through the complete tissue culture process, from selecting healthy starting cells to growing full food crops or cultured protein. It covers the science behind culture media, plant growth regulators, and cellular agriculture. It also addresses what the science means for food safety and your plate.

What Is Tissue Culture Using Healthy Cells?

Tissue culture using healthy cells is the in vitro (outside the living body) technique of isolating cells, tissues, or organs from a plant or animal and maintaining or multiplying them in a sterile nutrient solution.

The term “in vitro” comes from the Latin for “in glass,” which accurately describes early tissue culture work done in glass flasks and petri dishes. Today, plastic sterile vessels are standard.

The biological foundation of plant tissue culture is a property called totipotency: every plant cell theoretically carries the full genetic instructions to regenerate a complete plant. Scientists exploit totipotency to take a small piece of healthy plant tissue and multiply it into thousands of genetically identical, disease-free plants.

Animal tissue culture works differently. Animal cells are not totipotent, so scientists select specific cell types (muscle cells, fat cells, fibroblasts) and provide them with nutrients, growth factors, and a structural scaffold to multiply into organized tissue.

How Does the Tissue Culture Process Work Step by Step?

The tissue culture process follows a defined sequence: select healthy tissue, sterilize it, place it in sterile nutrient media, induce growth, multiply the cultures, and transition the new growth to independence.

This sequence applies to both plant and animal tissue culture, though the specific steps differ between the two. For plant food crops, the steps below represent the standard commercial micropropagation protocol used in facilities producing strawberry runners, banana plantlets, and potato seed stock.

To complete the full plant tissue culture process:

1. Select the donor plant. Choose a healthy, disease-free parent plant. Test it for known viruses, bacteria, and fungi before cutting. This is the single most important step.
2. Cut the explant. Remove a small piece of tissue (typically 0.5 to 1 centimeter) from the meristem, shoot tip, leaf, or node using a sterilized scalpel.
3. Surface sterilize the explant. Immerse the cut tissue in a 70% ethanol solution for 30 to 60 seconds, then transfer it to a 0.1% sodium hypochlorite (bleach) solution for 10 to 20 minutes. Rinse three times in sterile distilled water.
4. Transfer to culture media. Place the sterile explant onto or into the prepared nutrient agar medium inside a laminar flow hood to prevent contamination.
5. Incubate under controlled conditions. Maintain at 22 to 26 degrees Celsius (71.6 to 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit) with a 16-hour light / 8-hour dark photoperiod for most food crops.
6. Monitor and subculture. After 2 to 4 weeks, transfer multiplying shoots to fresh medium. Repeat this subculture every 3 to 6 weeks through the multiplication phase.
7. Root induction. Transfer shoots to a rooting medium with higher auxin concentration. Roots typically form within 2 to 4 weeks.
8. Acclimatization. Move rooted plantlets to a greenhouse environment gradually, reducing sterile conditions over 2 to 4 weeks before outdoor transplanting.

What Types of Healthy Cells Are Used in Tissue Culture?

The specific cell types used in tissue culture depend entirely on the application: food crop propagation, genetic conservation, or cultivated protein production.

For plant tissue culture in food production, the most commonly used cell and tissue types are:

• Apical meristems: The actively dividing cells at the tips of shoots. These are the gold standard for producing virus-free plants because viruses rarely penetrate meristematic tissue.
• Axillary buds: Dormant buds found at leaf-stem junctions. These are faster to establish and widely used for banana and potato propagation.
• Leaf tissue (mesophyll cells): Used when large-scale callus production is needed before regeneration.
• Hypocotyl and cotyledon sections: Used in legume and brassica crop tissue culture.

For animal tissue culture and cultivated meat production, the key cell types are:

• Myosatellite cells (muscle stem cells): The primary cell type used in cultured beef, pork, and chicken. These naturally repair and regrow muscle tissue in the living animal.
• Fibroblasts: Connective tissue cells used alongside muscle cells to create structural texture in cultivated meat products.
• Adipocytes (fat cells): Cultured separately to add fat marbling to cultivated meat. The Good Food Institute reports that replicating intramuscular fat is one of the key technical challenges in cellular agriculture.

The quality of the starting cell matters enormously. A contaminated or genetically unstable starting cell produces unreliable, potentially unsafe cultures throughout the entire production run.

Key Takeaway: The entire tissue culture process depends on starting with genuinely healthy, verified, disease-free cells. Every downstream step amplifies the quality (or the problems) of that original tissue selection.

How Is Explant Selection Done in Tissue Culture?

Explant selection is the process of choosing which part of a healthy donor plant or animal to use as the starting material for tissue culture. It is the single most consequential decision in the entire process.

The word “explant” refers to the living tissue removed from its original location and placed into culture. Think of it like choosing a starter culture for bread: the quality and character of what you begin with determines everything about what you end up with.

For food crops, explant selection criteria include:

• Physiological age: Young, actively growing tissue responds better than mature or dormant tissue. Spring growth flushes on fruit plants are preferred.
• Pathogen status: The donor plant must be tested and confirmed free of target viruses, bacteria, and fungi before any tissue is cut. In commercial strawberry production, indexing for at least 15 known viruses is standard practice per International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) guidelines.
• Genetic stability: The donor should be a known, verified cultivar. Mislabeled stock introduces genetic variability that only becomes apparent at the fruiting stage, months after planting.
• Tissue location: Meristematic (shoot tip) tissue is preferred over leaf or root tissue because it has a higher regeneration success rate.

For animal cell culture, the equivalent process is biopsy selection. A small, minimally invasive biopsy (typically 0.5 to 1 gram of muscle tissue) is taken from a healthy, living donor animal under veterinary supervision.

What Is Culture Media and Why Does It Matter?

Culture media is the sterile nutrient solution or gel that provides tissue-cultured cells with everything they need to survive, divide, and grow outside the parent organism.

Without the right media, even perfectly selected, perfectly healthy explants will fail. Media composition is the difference between a culture that thrives and one that goes brown within a week.

For plant tissue culture, the most widely used formula is Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium, developed in 1962 by Toshio Murashige and Folke Skoog at the University of Wisconsin. Despite its age, MS medium remains the industry standard for most food crops. It contains:

• Macronutrients: Nitrogen (as ammonium nitrate and potassium nitrate), phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur
• Micronutrients (trace elements): Iron, manganese, zinc, boron, copper, molybdenum
• Vitamins: Thiamine (vitamin B1), nicotinic acid (vitamin B3), pyridoxine (vitamin B6), myoinositol
• Carbon source: Sucrose (typically 30 grams per liter) as the primary energy source
• Solidifying agent: Agar at 6 to 8 grams per liter for semi-solid media, or omitted for liquid suspension cultures
• pH: Adjusted to 5.7 to 5.8 before sterilization. This is critical. A pH shift of even 0.3 units in either direction can halt cell growth entirely.

For animal cell culture in cultivated meat production, media must supply amino acids, glucose, vitamins, and growth factors. Traditionally this meant adding fetal bovine serum (FBS), which contains hundreds of growth-promoting proteins. The cultivated meat industry is actively developing animal-free serum replacements because FBS introduces cost, supply chain variability, and ethical concerns. As of 2026, several companies have reported successful large-scale cultures using plant-derived or precision-fermentation-produced growth factors.

How Do Plant Growth Regulators Control Tissue Culture?

Plant growth regulators (PGRs) are the chemical signals that tell tissue-cultured plant cells what to become. They are the “instructions” layer of the tissue culture process.

Think of PGRs like the settings on an oven: the same ingredients behave very differently depending on the combination and ratio you apply. The two most important classes for food crop tissue culture are auxins and cytokinins.

Auxins (primarily indole-3-acetic acid / IAA, indole-3-butyric acid / IBA, and naphthaleneacetic acid / NAA) promote:

• Root formation
• Cell elongation
• Callus initiation when used at high concentrations

Cytokinins (primarily 6-benzylaminopurine / BAP and kinetin) promote:

• Shoot proliferation
• Cell division
• Breaking of apical dominance to encourage multiple shoots

The ratio between auxin and cytokinin concentrations drives the developmental direction of the culture:

According to a review in Plant Cell Reports, getting the PGR ratios wrong is the most common reason tissue culture protocols fail when transferred from research labs to commercial production. A ratio that works for Cavendish banana (Musa acuminata) will not work for strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa). Each food crop species requires its own validated protocol.

PGRs used at standard tissue culture concentrations are present in vanishingly small amounts in the final plant. They do not carry forward into the edible food product at levels of dietary concern.

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What Is Callus Formation in Tissue Culture?

Callus is an undifferentiated mass of cells that forms when plant tissue is placed on culture media with a balanced or auxin-dominant hormone regime. It is often an intermediate stage in the tissue culture process for certain food crops.

Visually, callus looks like a soft, irregular lump of pale cream, white, or greenish tissue growing at the base of the explant. It has no organized structure: no shoots, no roots, no vascular tissue. It is plant cells multiplying without a developmental direction.

The callus phase matters in food production tissue culture for two reasons. First, it can be used to generate large quantities of genetic material quickly before directing that material toward shoot or root formation. Second, it can be problematic: cells maintained in callus phase for too long accumulate somaclonal variation, which is random genetic change caused by the stress of in vitro culture conditions.

According to research published in the Journal of Plant Physiology, somaclonal variation rates increase significantly after 12 to 18 months of continuous callus subculture in most food crop species. For commercial food crop propagation, this is why most facilities avoid prolonged callus culture and move explants directly through shoot multiplication to rooting.

• In banana micropropagation, callus formation is bypassed in favor of direct shoot tip culture to maintain genetic uniformity.
• In potato (Solanum tuberosum) production, callus is sometimes used to generate minitubers (tiny seed potato units) for virus-free seed stock programs.
• In some strawberry cultivar development programs, callus-based regeneration is used to screen for natural disease resistance variants before multiplication.

Key Takeaway: Callus is a powerful but risky intermediate stage in tissue culture. Commercial food crop production generally minimizes callus time to protect genetic stability and prevent unwanted mutations in the propagated plants.

How Does Organogenesis and Shoot Development Work?

Organogenesis is the process by which undifferentiated callus cells or directly cultured explant tissue reorganize into identifiable organs: shoots, leaves, and eventually roots. It is the point where tissue culture transitions from cell biology to visible plant development.

The word “organogenesis” is borrowed from embryology, where it describes the same concept in animal development. In plant tissue culture, it specifically refers to the formation of shoots (called caulogenesis) or roots (called rhizogenesis) from cultured tissue.

Shoot organogenesis is induced by shifting the culture medium toward a higher cytokinin-to-auxin ratio. Within 2 to 6 weeks (depending on the species), small green shoot buds appear at the surface of the callus or explant. These elongate into full shoots within another 2 to 4 weeks.

For food crop production, the shoot multiplication phase is where the economics of tissue culture become impressive. A single strawberry shoot tip can produce 4 to 8 new shoots per subculture cycle. With monthly subcultures, one starting explant can theoretically yield tens of thousands of plants within a year.

Once shoots reach a height of 2 to 3 centimeters, they are separated and transferred to rooting medium. This medium typically contains a higher auxin concentration (IBA or NAA) and reduced or absent cytokinin, which shifts the developmental signal toward root formation.

The entire organogenesis phase, from first callus appearance to a rooted plantlet ready for acclimatization, takes approximately 8 to 16 weeks for most commercial food crops, including banana, potato, and strawberry. According to the USDA Agricultural Research Service, commercial micropropagation facilities operate on rolling production cycles specifically timed to these developmental windows to maintain consistent output.

How Are Tissue-Cultured Plants Acclimatized to the Real World?

Acclimatization (also called hardening off) is the gradual transition of sterile, in vitro-grown plantlets to the outdoor or greenhouse environment. It is one of the highest-risk phases of the entire tissue culture process.

Plants raised in tissue culture live in conditions that are nothing like a farm field. The humidity inside a sealed culture vessel is close to 100%. Light levels are controlled and moderate. Temperature never fluctuates. There is no wind, no soil microbiome, and no water stress. The leaves of in vitro plants often lack the functional waxy cuticle that protects outdoor plants from dehydration.

When taken directly from the culture vessel to ambient conditions, plantlets lose water rapidly through unregulated stomata and often die within hours. Acclimatization solves this by introducing environmental stresses gradually over 2 to 4 weeks.

Standard acclimatization protocol for food crop plantlets:

1. Week 1: Transfer rooted plantlets to sterile peat and perlite (or coco coir) mix in covered trays. Maintain 80 to 90% relative humidity using clear plastic covers or a misting system. Keep out of direct sun.
2. Week 2: Begin venting trays for 30 minutes daily, increasing to 2 hours by end of week. Introduce a half-strength balanced liquid fertilizer.
3. Week 3: Remove covers for progressively longer periods. Introduce indirect natural light. Begin fungal disease monitoring.
4. Week 4: Transfer to normal greenhouse conditions. Begin standard fertilization and irrigation. Inspect for somaclonal variation (abnormal leaf shape, unusual growth pattern).

Survival rates in well-managed commercial acclimatization facilities typically exceed 90% for established food crop protocols, according to data published by the International Society for Horticultural Science.

How Is Tissue Culture Used in Food Crop Production?

Tissue culture is one of the most widely used tools in commercial food crop production, responsible for billions of disease-free planting units distributed globally every year.

The biggest food production application is the elimination of systemic plant viruses. Many crop viruses live inside vascular tissue but cannot penetrate the actively dividing cells of the apical meristem. Cutting a shoot tip of just 0.2 to 0.5 millimeters and culturing it without the surrounding tissue produces a virus-free plant. This technique is called meristem culture or shoot tip culture and is the foundation of certified virus-free seed potato programs in North America, Europe, and Australia.

The food crops most dependent on tissue culture for commercial production include:

• Cavendish banana (Musa acuminata): Bananas produce no viable seeds. Every commercial Cavendish plant is propagated vegetatively. Tissue culture is the only way to produce millions of uniform, disease-free banana plants quickly enough for global supply.
• Potato (Solanum tuberosum): Tissue culture produces virus-indexed minitubers used as the foundation of certified seed potato programs. One starting meristem culture can generate disease-free seed stock for entire seasons.
• Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa): Commercial strawberry runners are tested and certified through tissue culture programs. The USDA Agricultural Research Service operates virus-tested strawberry foundation stock programs that supply the entire U.S. commercial industry.
• Garlic (Allium sativum): Garlic accumulates viruses over generations of clonal propagation. Tissue culture restores clean, high-yielding stock.
• Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis): Tissue culture allows rapid multiplication of elite disease-resistant asparagus clones that would take decades to multiply by conventional division.

Key Takeaway: Tissue culture is not a fringe technology. It is the direct source of the disease-free bananas, potatoes, and strawberries in grocery stores right now, and the foundation of the certified seed programs that protect global food supply quality.

What Is Cellular Agriculture and Lab-Grown Protein?

Cellular agriculture is the production of animal products (meat, seafood, dairy, eggs) directly from animal cells, without raising or slaughtering animals. Tissue culture is the core enabling technology.

The term “cellular agriculture” was coined in 2016 by the New Harvest organization. The Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit research organization focused on alternative proteins, defines cultivated meat as “meat produced by cultivating animal cells in a controlled environment.” Both definitions describe the same process: applying animal cell tissue culture techniques to food production.

The two main product categories in cellular agriculture are:

• Cultivated meat: Beef, chicken, pork, or seafood grown from animal muscle, fat, and connective tissue cells in a bioreactor
• Precision fermentation products: Dairy proteins, egg whites, and other animal-derived food ingredients produced by microorganisms programmed to make specific proteins (technically distinct from tissue culture, though often discussed together)

For the purposes of tissue culture, cultivated meat is the relevant application. Cellular agriculture applies the same foundational techniques as medical cell culture (sterile environment, growth media, proliferation protocols) specifically to food production.

Cellular agriculture products are distinct from:

• Plant-based meat: No animal cells involved. Uses plant proteins shaped to resemble meat.
• Conventional meat: Produced by raising and slaughtering animals.
• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs): Cultivated meat cells are not genetically modified in standard production. They are the same cell types that exist in a living animal.

How Is Cultured Meat Produced Using Tissue Culture?

Cultured meat production uses tissue culture principles applied to animal muscle and fat cells. The process starts with a small biopsy from a living animal and ends with a food product.

The Good Food Institute describes the core production steps as: cell sourcing, cell banking, proliferation, differentiation, and scaffolding. Here is how each step works in a food production context:

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1. Cell sourcing: A small biopsy (0.5 to 1 gram) of muscle tissue is taken from a living donor animal. Myosatellite cells (muscle stem cells) are isolated from the biopsy.
2. Cell banking: The isolated cells are tested for genetic stability and pathogen status, then stored cryogenically (at approximately -196 degrees Celsius in liquid nitrogen). A well-developed cell bank can supply decades of production from a single biopsy.
3. Proliferation: Cells are thawed and placed in growth media containing amino acids, glucose, vitamins, and growth factors. They divide and multiply exponentially. One biopsy can produce enough cells to fill a bioreactor holding thousands of liters.
4. Differentiation: Growth factors are modified to signal cells to stop dividing and begin specializing into mature muscle fibers. This mirrors what happens naturally in muscle repair in a living animal.
5. Scaffolding: For structured products (steak, chicken breast), cells are seeded onto a scaffold made from food-grade structural proteins (collagen, soy protein, pea protein, or mycoprotein). The scaffold gives cells a three-dimensional architecture to grow into and provides texture.
6. Harvest: Cultured tissue is harvested from the bioreactor, processed, and formed into the final food product.

The key nutritional parallel: according to GFI research reports, the protein profile of cultivated beef myosatellite cells closely mirrors conventional beef muscle tissue. Fat content and flavor compounds are areas of active development.

People who avoid all animal products should note that cultivated meat is derived from animal cells and is not suitable for a vegan diet, even though no animals are slaughtered in production.

Are Tissue-Cultured Foods Safe to Eat?

Tissue-cultured food products, including commercially propagated plants and regulated cultivated meat products, are subject to food safety testing and have not shown adverse health effects in the studies and regulatory reviews conducted to date.

For tissue-cultured plants (bananas, potatoes, strawberries), the safety question is essentially settled. The tissue culture process produces genetically identical copies of known, approved food varieties. No tissue culture media components are present in the final edible crop at detectable levels. Decades of commercial production and consumption have produced no documented adverse effects attributable to the tissue culture propagation method itself.

For cultivated meat, the safety question is more recent and more actively studied. The main food safety considerations are:

• Residual growth media components: Culture media must be thoroughly removed from the final product. Manufacturers are required to validate cleaning and removal processes.
• Microbial contamination risk: In vitro culture environments are sterile by design. Loss of sterility during production is the primary contamination risk and is controlled by Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) protocols.
• Allergen status: Scaffolding proteins derived from soy or wheat may introduce allergen concerns for sensitive individuals. Labels must disclose these ingredients.
• Cell line stability: Long-term cell culture raises theoretical concerns about spontaneous genetic changes in the cells over time. Regulatory review processes require manufacturers to demonstrate cell line stability.

According to a 2023 FDA regulatory guidance document on human food made from cultured animal cells, both the FDA and USDA have the authority and responsibility to jointly regulate cultivated meat. The FDA oversees cell collection, growth, and differentiation; USDA-FSIS oversees processing and labeling.

What Is the Regulatory Status of Tissue-Cultured Food Products?

The regulatory status of tissue-cultured food products varies by category. Plant tissue-cultured crops are fully integrated into existing food systems. Cultivated meat is in active regulatory development as of 2026.

Plant tissue-cultured food crops do not require special regulatory approval in the United States beyond standard phytosanitary certification for planting material. The plants produced are genetically identical to conventionally bred varieties. They are not classified as genetically modified organisms. They do not require novel food labeling.

Cultivated meat operates under a landmark joint regulatory framework established by the FDA and USDA in 2019. The framework assigns:

• FDA jurisdiction over the cell collection, banking, and cultivation phases
• USDA-FSIS jurisdiction over the harvest, processing, packaging, and labeling of the final food product

In June 2023, the USDA granted the first-ever market authorizations for cultivated chicken products in the United States. This was a historic regulatory milestone. As of 2026, the cultivated meat regulatory framework continues to develop, with additional product categories undergoing pre-market safety review.

Key regulatory requirements for cultivated meat producers include:

• Demonstrating the safety of the cell line used (including genetic stability testing)
• Validating the safety and removal of all culture media components
• Allergen disclosure for all scaffold proteins used in the final product
• Compliance with GMP standards throughout the production facility
• Accurate product labeling that identifies the product as “cell-cultivated” or equivalent approved terminology

The FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) maintains a public database of completed pre-market consultations for cultivated food products. Consumers who want to verify the regulatory status of a specific cultivated product can reference that database directly.

Tissue culture-propagated plants used for organic food production can be certified organic, provided that no synthetic plant growth regulators remain in the final edible portion and that acclimatization is done in compliance with the USDA National Organic Program standards.

Key Takeaway: Plant tissue-cultured foods are already fully integrated into the conventional food system with no special labeling required. Cultivated meat is under active FDA and USDA regulatory oversight, and any product reaching shelves has passed pre-market safety review.

Frequently Asked Questions About Tissue Culture Using Healthy Cells

What is the difference between plant tissue culture and animal cell culture?

Plant tissue culture exploits a plant cell’s ability to regenerate a full organism from a single cell (totipotency), while animal cell culture grows specific cell types (muscle, fat, connective tissue) that do not have this regenerative capacity.
The media, growth signals, and physical environment differ substantially between the two.
Plant tissue culture uses agar-based or liquid nutrient media with phytohormones; animal cell culture uses liquid media with animal-derived or synthetic growth factors and requires scaffold support for structured tissue.

Are foods grown through tissue culture genetically modified?

Tissue culture-propagated plants are not genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the regulatory sense.
The process copies an existing plant’s genetics exactly rather than inserting new genetic sequences.
In the United States, tissue-cultured plants do not require GMO labeling under USDA and FDA rules, because no genetic engineering has taken place.

How long does the tissue culture process take for food crops?

From explant selection to a fully acclimatized plantlet ready for field transplanting, the tissue culture process for most food crops takes 12 to 24 weeks depending on the species.
Banana micropropagation typically requires 16 to 20 weeks from shoot tip to transplant-ready plantlet.
Potato minituber production can be completed in 10 to 14 weeks under optimized protocols.

Is lab-grown meat produced using tissue culture the same as conventional meat nutritionally?

The protein composition of cultivated muscle cells is biochemically similar to conventional meat from the same animal species.
According to Good Food Institute research, the amino acid profile of cultivated beef closely mirrors that of conventional beef muscle tissue.
Fat content and micronutrient levels (particularly B vitamins, iron, and zinc) are areas of active research, with some products achieving equivalence and others still under development.

Which food crops are most commonly produced through tissue culture?

The food crops most widely produced through commercial tissue culture are banana, potato, strawberry, garlic, and asparagus.
Banana production relies almost entirely on tissue culture because the commercial Cavendish variety produces no viable seeds.
Potato and strawberry production uses tissue culture primarily to generate certified, virus-free planting stock that seeds the entire commercial supply.

Closing

Tissue culture using healthy cells is one of the least visible but most consequential technologies in the modern food system. Every Cavendish banana you peel, every certified strawberry runner planted in a commercial field, and every virus-free potato seed tuber used in commercial production carries the fingerprints of this process.

The science behind it is precise but learnable. Start with healthy cells, give them the right environment, provide the right chemical signals, and plant life multiplies in ways that were unimaginable a century ago.

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For cultivated meat, the same foundational science is moving from the lab bench to the food production floor. The regulatory frameworks are in place, the safety reviews are active, and the first products have already reached consumers.