This chapter focuses on the fundamentals of animal cell culture for cultivated meat production. We will explore how cultivated meat companies approach cell cultivation to align with the industry's goals of creating food products that meet consumer expectations for taste, cost, and safety. Building on the foundations established by the "red biotech" industry, we have adapted many of its technologies but have also had to make significant advancements to address the unique requirements of food production. The chapter covers the current state of the art and highlights future developments in the field. We will explain the basics of cell culture, including production facilities, cell lines, cell culture growth conditions, and cell culture media. Special emphasis will be placed on growth media optimization, which remains one of the most critical areas of development. We will discuss general approaches for medium optimization including analytical methods for monitoring key quality attributes. Finally, we will present examples of optimization processes we performed in our platform using bovine embryonic stem cells for large-scale cell mass production.