WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Animals and humans need protein, but it’s getting expensive and its environmental footprint is crazy. Lab made meat is real meat without the cost or the footprint.

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I’ve been talking about our ability to make actual meat without the animal – in essence re-creating what happens inside an animal, namely growing meat, happen outside of an animal in a lab using a process called Cellular Agriculture – for years now. A very long time ago I had this conversation with KPMG UK who told me that a famous pet brand was exploring the tech for use in pet food, and now it’s happening …

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat. The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

It’s thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock. Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.

The Future of Food, with Futurist Matthew Griffin

The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.

Meatly’s production facility has been approved by the government to handle its cultivated chicken, and it plans to launch the first samples of its commercially available pet food this year. The company says it will then focus on cost reduction and starting to scale production to reach industrial volumes within the next three years. The cost reductions could be done by mixing the meat with vegetables, as is done with other pet foods containing costly animal products.

It has raised £3.5m from investors so far and expects to raise £5m in its next fundraising round. The previous UK government had been looking at fast-tracking the approval of cultivated meat for human consumption. The Food Standards Agency has said it is trying to find a way to bypass the long process of regulating a food product and bringing it to market, something the Conservative government was pushing for as a “Brexit benefit.”

Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, said: “The UK is a world leader in developing cultivated meat and the approval of a cultivated pet food is an important milestone. It underscores the potential for new innovation to help reduce the negative impacts of intensive animal agriculture.

“The first UK applications for cultivated meat produced for humans remain under assessment with the Food Standards Agency. If we’re to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat – from enhancing food security to supporting the expansion of regenerative farming – the government must invest in the research and infrastructure needed to make it delicious, affordable and accessible for people across the UK.”

Other approaches vary significantly, and countries including Singapore and Israel have approved products for human consumption. However, despite the US FDA also approving it in the US the states of Florida and Alabama have banned cultivated meat, with politicians having complained that the products threaten livestock farmers.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Many people query the ethics of using foetal bovine serum to grow lab based meats, but this new synthetic protein not only solves that but will make lab meat cheaper to boot.

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Japanese engineering giant Hitachi Zosen is set to enter the cellular meat industry by supplying synthetic protein to producers, with plans to commence sales as early as 2025. Something that I’ve been talking about for a long time finally this ground breaking development promises to reduce production costs by an impressive 90%  and finally replace the need for incredibly expensive natural proteins extracted from animal foetuses which is the current method. Furthermore, at the new price point, cellular meat like bacon, beef, chicken, duck, tiger, and even salmon and tuna steaks, could very easily undercut the price of meat sourced by culling animals.

The synthetic protein, essential for artificial meat production, will be crafted using a novel technique developed by NUProtein, a Tokushima-based startup in Japan. Hitachi Zosen has also contributed to cost reduction by optimizing a crucial step in the production process.

The Future of Food, by Matthew Griffin

Traditional substitutes for meat are typically derived from plant sources like soybeans or grown from animal cells. However, NUProtein takes a unique approach by combining mRNA extracted from animal DNA with wheat germ to create the synthetic protein.

Creating this protein requires precise blending of ingredients within a wheat germ solution. Leveraging its expertise in crafting machines capable of accurately measuring and adding components for beverages and seasonings, Hitachi Zosen has automated the wheat germ solution preparation process.

The lab-grown meat market is poised for significant growth, projected to reach $25 billion by 2030, according to McKinsey & Co. Notably, in Singapore, a pioneer in cellular meat made from lab-grown chicken meat are currently available for around $13.

Hitachi Zosen aims to commence sales of its synthetic protein to artificial meat producers in Singapore, potentially as early as the fiscal year beginning April 2025. The company also has aspirations to expand this venture to the United States and Japan.

Lab-grown meat made its debut in 2013 with a hamburger patty that took two years to produce at a cost exceeding $300,000. Since then, significant progress has been made, allowing cultured patties to be manufactured for hundreds of dollars. Nevertheless, they remain relatively expensive for the average consumer. Hitachi Zosen and NUProtein’s innovative approach holds the promise of potentially reducing the cost per patty to a more affordable range in the lower double digits.

The emergence of artificial meat is seen as a solution to address food insecurity issues by eliminating the need for livestock farming. Additionally, it has the environmental benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as lab-grown meat production is more efficient and environmentally friendly compared to traditional livestock farming.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Meat that’s made in a lab, rather than by an animal, will revolutionise food production and could help end global hunger, and it’s take a long time to get here.

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After years being developed, after much scaling, and being approved for sale in Singapore cultivated meat, also known as lab grown meat, which takes the cells of animals to grow them into everything from the same beef burgers and tuna fillets, and even elephant, lion, and zebra burgers, you buy in the supermarkets, has finally been cleared for sale in the US.

Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies that make what they call “cultivated chicken,” said Wednesday that they have gotten approval from the US Department of Agriculture to start producing their cell-based proteins.

The Future of Food, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

After scaling up recently Good Meat, which is owned by plant-based egg substitute maker Eat Just, said that production is starting immediately. Cultivated or lab-grown meat is grown in a giant vat, much like what you’d find at a beer brewery.

Good Meat, which has been selling its products in Singapore, advertises its product as “meat without slaughter,” a more humane approach to eating meat. Supporters hope that cultured meat will help fight climate change by reducing the need for traditional animal agriculture, which emits greenhouse gases.

The company had previously announced that it was partnering with chef and restaurateur José Andrés to bring the item to a Washington, DC restaurant. It is working with his team on a launch but doesn’t have specific information on timing at this point, according to a company spokesperson.

The regulatory hurdle cleared Wednesday is called a “grant of inspection,” which is issued by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Applications for such a grant “are approved following a rigorous process, which includes assessing a firm’s food safety system,” an FSIS spokesperson said Wednesday.

“This announcement that we’re now able to produce and sell cultivated meat in the United States is a major moment for our company, the industry and the food system,” Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Good Meat and Eat Just, said in a statement.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Have you ever wondered what Woolly mammoths tasted like? Now you can find out with sci-fi foodtech!

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Today scientists are thinking about de-extincting the Woolly Mammoth – for real, and Japanese researchers even bought 28,000 year old Woolly Mammoth cells back to life. We can also take the cells from animals and turn them into meat like bacon, chicken nuggets, steak, or tuna fillets, without the animal. So it now seems only fitting that after one company said they were going to use the latter technology, known as Cellular Agriculture, to create Tiger and T-Rex burgers, and another used the tech to create human burgers – yes you heard that right – that a company has use this off the wall tech to create a giant meatball made from flesh cultivated using the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth. It was unveiled on Tuesday at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.

The meatball was created by Australian cultured meat company Vow which – promising this was not an April Fools’ joke – said it wanted to get people talking about cultured meat, calling it a more sustainable alternative for real meat.

The Future of Food, by keynote Matthew Griffin

“We wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now,” Vow founder Tim Noakesmith told Reuters, adding that an additional reason for choosing mammoth is that scientists believe that the animal’s extinction was caused by climate change.

The meatball was made of sheep cells inserted with a singular mammoth gene called myoglobin.

“When it comes to meat, myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the colour and the taste”, James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer explained.

Since the mammoth’s DNA sequence obtained by Vow had a few gaps, African elephant DNA was inserted to complete it.

“Much like they do in the movie Jurassic Park”, Ryall said, stressing the biggest difference is that they were not creating actual animals.

That’s one giant meatball!

While creating cultured meat usually means using blood of a dead calf, Vow used an alternative, meaning no animals were killed in the making of the mammoth meatball.

The meatball, which has the aroma of crocodile meat, is currently not for consumption.

“Its protein is literally 4,000 years old. We haven’t seen it in a very long time. That means we want to put it through rigorous tests, something that we would do with any product we bring to the market,” Noakesmith said.

Vow hopes to put cultured meat on the map in the European Union, a market where such meat as food is not regulated yet.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Why grow cows in fields when you can just grow the steaks sustainably in a lab? Food is being re-invented …

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After numerous breakthroughs in growing meat from just the cells of animals to produce everything from lab made beef, chicken, duck, fish, and even lion and zebra, Zürich-based startup Mirai Foods has made another breakthrough in the cultivated meat industry. They developed a technique that efficiently cultivates muscle tissue that mimics conventional meat, resulting in what it calls the “world’s first cultivated tenderloin steak,” according to the press release.

While other types of meat can be produced in the lab, the fillet steak is considered a significant challenge because of its complex structure consisting of different cell types. According to Christoph Mayr, CEO and co-founder of Mirai Foods, the technology used for producing this steak is called Fibration Technology, for which they have filed three international patents.

The Future of Food, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

The first cultivated tender steak comes from Mirai Foods’ in-house developed bioreactor, “The Rocket.” The process requires long, mature, cultivated muscle fibers, which are combined with enzymes and supplemented with cultivated fat tissue. After five days in the bioreactor, “a tenderloin centerpiece is complete, from which steaks of almost any thickness can be cut.”

According to Suman Das, CSO and co-founder of Mirai Foods, the technology can provide a real alternative to conventional meat, allowing people to prepare and eat authentic steak without harming the climate or animals.

Mirai Foods is one of the few cultivated meat companies in the world capable of producing meat without using genetic engineering, a technology that is heavily restricted in the E.U. The company claims that its meat meets the highest standards of taste, quality, and health while remaining in line with the preferences of European consumers.

The company is building on the industry’s efforts to produce whole cuts of meat through cultivation. While most of the products so far have resembled mince beef for use in burgers and nuggets, BSF Enterprises debuted a whole-cultivated pork loin in 2023, and Japanese researchers have also developed a whole-cut steak from cultured cells.

Mirai’s cultivated meat has already attracted investors, including Angst AG, a food and meat producer based in Zürich. The company plans to bring Mirai’s cultivated meat into its range of offerings once the technology has received regulatory approval. Mirai Foods was launched in 2019 and has raised more than $5 million in funding in a 2021 Seed round.

The company’s achievement is an important step towards sustainable meat production. With the expected doubling of demand for meat by 2050, conventional methods of meat production cannot meet this demand in a sustainable way. Developing sustainable and ethical meat production methods, such as Fibration Technology, can reduce the environmental impact of meat production and provide a real alternative to conventional meat.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Why raise chickens for meat when you can just grow that meat in a lab without all the anti-biotics, environmental damage, and nuisance?

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A few years ago if you wanted to buy a chicken nugget, or a burger, then that meat would have come from an animal, but now thanks to Cellular Agriculture, which uses an advanced manufacturing technology called a bio-reactor to grow meat without the animal, you don’t need the animal any longer. And while you couldn’t buy meat cultivated in this way in the US you could in Singapore after the government passed regulations to allow its sale a couple of years ago. Now though, if you live in the US you can buy it soon too after the FDA gave it the thumbs up.

In 2020, cultured meat startup Memphis Meats raised $161 million in Series B funding, making it the most-funded startup in the industry. The investment validated cultured meat’s technological soundness and indicated that consumer interest in these products was likely to grow.

After changing its name to Upside Foods in 2021, the company received an additional $400 million in Series C funding this past April. Now they’ve reached another milestone: this week the FDA granted the company the first approval needed to bring its meat to consumers.

Learn more about feeing 8 Billion people, by keynote Matthew Griffin

The approval is called a No Questions letter and means that after conducting a thorough evaluation the FDA concluded that Upside’s lab made poultry is safe to eat. The letter doesn’t apply to all of the company’s products, only to its cultured chicken for now; additional offerings will have to undergo the same FDA evaluation process.

“This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production, and I’m thrilled that US consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that’s grown directly from animal cells,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, Upside’s CEO and founder.

The No Questions letter isn’t an easy approval to lock down, and now that Upside has it, the remaining steps to start selling its chicken should move relatively quickly. The company’s production facilities and the chicken itself will both need to pass USDA inspections and receive seals of approval.

A year ago Upside opened its EPIC facility, a 53,000-square-foot center for engineering, production, and innovation in Emeryville, California. Not all of the space is operational yet, but the facility will eventually be able to produce multiple types of lab made meat, poultry, and seafood; Upside plans to initially make more than 50,000 pounds of meat per year there, scaling up to more than 400,000 pounds per year.

Once the company receives the remaining two approvals it needs, its cultured chicken won’t be available in grocery stores right away; curious consumers will first be able to try it in select restaurants.

“We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage,” Valeti said. “We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better.” The first to sign on is Dominique Crenn, a Michelin-starred chef who runs Atelier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco.

Cultured meat is made by harvesting muscle cells from an animal then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and growth factors so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue; it’s not terribly different from the way muscle grows in vivo. But the bio-reactors where growth happens don’t produce ready-to-eat cuts of meat. The harvested cells need to be refined and shaped into a final product, which could involve extrusion cooking, molding, and even 3D printing.

This process isn’t cheap, especially because it’s still in its very early years and hasn’t yet been scaled to any significant level. Upside doesn’t share details of its production costs, but it seems the per-unit cost of cultured meat is generally trending downward: last year the cost of lab-grown chicken reached $7.70 per pound, as compared to an average at the time of $3.62 per pound for conventional chicken.

Valeti plans to focus on scaling production over the next few years. He’s not alone; competitor Good Meat is planning to build a large cultured meat production facility in the US, aiming for domestic production to start by late 2024.

Besides lowering costs, raising consumer awareness about the benefits of cultured meat products will also be key; namely, that they’re better for animals and for the environment but offer an identical nutritional profile to farmed meat.

Valeti seems optimistic. “Our goal is to introduce consumers to cultivated meat to dispel any confusion with meat alternatives,” he said. “This is going to open up the entire cultivated meat space, and as the pioneer, we are writing the playbook and sharing it with people… the consumer will fall in love with this.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you don’t need animals to make meat you don’t need to feed them crops or water, deforest the Amazon, or figure out ways to eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions …

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Meat used to come from animals, but now it comes from just the cells of animals grown in bioreactors in labs – a new food production method called “Cultivated Meat.” And not only is this new method getting cheaper, but from Singapore to the US people can now buy, for example, chicken nuggets made in this way from restaurants and supermarkets.

In order to meet the growing demand for meat made in this way just under a year ago one of the biggest production facilities for cultured meat opened in Israel. Future Meat Technologies’ Rehovot plant produces 500 kilograms of lab grown meat per day – that’s equivalent to about 5,000 burger patties – and last week the company revealed plans for an even bigger facility, this one in the US. Its specific location has yet to be finalised, but the project will bring cultured meat production to an unprecedented scale.

The Future of Food, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

The bioreactors planned for the US facility will be over 40 feet tall and will hold 250,000 liters, that’s 66,043 gallons, of meat which could be used to create over 200,000 burger patties each day – a scale which significantly changes the economics of the industry and its future.

Needless to say this is a massive scale up from existing technology and the same manufacturer that’s making the US gear, ABEC, is also making a smaller 6,000 litre bioreactor for a facility in Singapore which when it becomes operational in 2023 will be the biggest of its kind installed to date until the US factory goes online.

Multiplying that by more than a factor of 40 then and making sure the quality of the final product is still the same will be no small feat.

The company behind the new mega project is California based Good Meat. Though the company has been selling its lab grown chicken in Singapore since 2020 it’s still awaiting FDA approval to sell its products in the US, but that’s not stopping it from going ahead with the ambitious plans for the new facility, though.

“The bioreactors will be far and away the largest, not only in the cultivated meat industry, but in the biopharma industry too,” said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Good Meat’s parent company, Eat Just. “So the design and engineering challenges are significant, the capital investments are significant, and the potential to take another step toward shifting society away from slaughtered meat is significant.”

Cultivated meat – not to be confused with plant based meat – is grown from animal cells and is biologically the same as meat that comes from an animal. The process starts with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and naturally occurring growth factors or, as Good Meat’s process specifies, amino acids, fats, and vitamins, so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue in much the same way muscle grows inside animals’ bodies.

According to Good Meat’s website, they use cells from only “the best” chickens and cows, and carefully choose cells most likely to produce flavourful, sustainable meat. Besides being used as starters to grow edible meat in bioreactors, the cells are also “immortalised,” growing and dividing over and over; cells from one chicken could end up producing thousands of breasts.

“Cultivated meat matters because it will enable us to eat meat without all the harm, without bulldozing forests, without the need to slaughter an animal, without the need to use antibiotics, without accelerating zoonotic diseases,” Tetrick said.

Meat can be “harvested” just four to six weeks after initiating the growth process but it’s not a matter of plucking a ready-to-package breast from a vat and shipping it off to the grocery store. Besides going through safety and regulatory reviews, the harvested cells need to be turned into something resembling traditional meat. Good Meat says it uses 3D printing, extrusion cooking, and molding to refine the shape and texture of the product.

This all starts to sound a little Franken-meaty, but the company emphasizes that its products have nutritional profiles identical to those of conventionally raised meat. A few of the “final formats” the meat comes in include chicken nugget bites, sausages, shredded chicken, and chicken breasts.

It’s going to take a long time for factory farming to stop being a thing, but as cultivated meat continues to become more scalable, that day could be on the horizon. Tetrick thinks it’ll happen within his generation’s lifetime.

“I think our grandchildren are going to ask us about why we ate meat from slaughtered animals back in 2022,” he said.

Good Meat is expected to finalize the location of its US plant before summer’s end, and they’re aiming for domestic production to start by late 2024.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you can take the cell from an animal and use it to grow meat in bioreactors then that cell can be from any animal – from T-Rex’s to Porcupines and Pandas … this is a food revolution.

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By now you’ll have heard about being able to take the cell from an animal, literally any animal, and then use it to then grow meat – whether it’s chicken nuggets, steaks, salmon or tuna fillets, or even zebra burgers. Well, now in an extension of that trend and following on from a company that made human meat burgers recently because they could lab grown meat company Primeval Foods is planning to bring a whole host of exotic meats to the market, including elephant, lion, and tiger.

But instead of going on a safari and butchering endangered animals the startup is hoping to replicate the gastronomical experience by cultivating cells inside a lab, a new approach that could diners’ lives a lot more exciting in years to come.

The Future of Food, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

It’s a clever take on the trend — especially considering most of the company’s potential customers have no idea what any of those exotic meats even taste like — and the company has already found a couple of Michelin-starred restaurants in London to preview its dishes, FoodNavigator reports.

The outfit claims that lab meat “allows us to produce food from any species without the expense of nature and animals,” which allows them to “explore what is beyond the tip of the iceberg.” But, as is the case for most if not all other lab-grown meat alternatives, the process still relies on live animals, albeit minimally, for growth hormones. But that’s changing.

“We select a small sample of tissue from the healthiest wild animals; meanwhile, they continue to enjoy their life,” the company says.

While big cats have a “unique amino acid and protein profile,” elephants have more “fattiness in their muscle tissue,” which makes for “an exceptional umami experience,” according to the company.

“We are currently working on: the Siberian tiger, leopard, black panther, Bengal tiger, white lion, lion, and zebra,” said Yilmaz Bora, a managing partner at Primeval Foods.

Primeval Foods isn’t the only company trying to stray from the usual selection of beef and chicken in the rising world of lab-grown meat though, there’s Orbillion Bio, for instance, a startup trying to bring lab-grown elk sausages and even Wagyu sashimi to market.

There’s certainly a growing momentum behind lab-grown meat — but whether consumers will play along and be willing to sample elephant and giraffe meat remains to be seen. And that’s only if they can get the price down to an accessible level, which is already happening – and fast.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If we can take cells from an animal and grow meat from those cells then we can do it with any animal – including humans …

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The world faces a food crisis, and now there’s a new solution – eating yourself. Literally. Welcome to the fricking weird world that is the future. Over the past few years companies around the world have been growing animal free meat using nothing more than animal cells grown in cellular cultures in bioreactors. And they’ve been very successful – whether it’s growing fillet steaks, bacon, beef, chicken, duck, pork belly, and turkey or salmon and tuna steaks or all manner of other meats. However, this method works with any animal cells which also opens the door to ethical zebra burgers and even authentic T-Rex burgers.

Now though, in a sick and actually incorrect twist which we’ll discuss in a minute, a group of American scientists and designers have developed a concept for a grow-your-own steak kit using human cells and blood to question the ethics of the cultured meat industry. In short, they’ve created mini human burgers. Yes, you heard that right.

Ouroboros Steak could be grown by the diner at home using their own cells, which are harvested from the inside of their cheek and fed serum derived from expired, donated blood. The resulting bite-sized pieces of meat, currently on display as prototypes at the Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition, are created entirely without causing harm to animals. The creators argued this cannot be said about the growing selection of cultured meat made from animal cells.

Despite the lab-grown meat industry claiming to offer a more sustainable, cruelty-free alternative to factory farming, the process still relies on foetal bovine serum (FBS) as a protein-rich growth supplement for animal cell cultures. And this is where their “good” intentions go awry because efforts are already under way in the UK to create synthetic proteins that eliminate the need to use FBS.

Human burgers – literally. Courtesy: Ouroboros Steaks

FBS, which costs around £300 to £700 per litre, is derived from the blood of calf foetuses after their pregnant mothers are slaughtered by the meat or dairy industry. So lab-grown meat remains a by product of polluting agricultural practices, much like regular meat. For now.

“Foetal bovine serum costs significant amounts of money and the lives of animals,” said scientist Andrew Pelling, who developed the Ouroboros Steak with industrial designer Grace Knight and artist and researcher Orkan Telhan.

“Although some lab-grown meat companies are claiming to have solved this problem, to our knowledge no independent, peer-reviewed, scientific studies have validated these claims,” Pelling continued.

“As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype.”

Ouroboros Steak, named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail, cuts out the need for other animals by drawing exclusively on human blood and cells.

The version on display at London’s Design Museum was made using human cell cultures, which can be purchased for research and development purposes from the American Tissue Culture Collection (ATCC). They were fed with human serum derived from expired blood donations that would otherwise have been discarded or incinerated.

Amuse-bouche-sized steaks are preserved in resin and laid out on a plate complete with a placemat and silverware as a tongue-in-cheek nod to American diner culture.

As part of the DIY kit, the team envisions users collecting cells from the inside of their own cheek using a cotton swab and depositing them onto pre-grown scaffolds made from mushroom mycelium.

For around three months, these are stored in a warm environment such as a low-temperature oven and fed with human serum until the steak is fully grown.

“Expired human blood is a waste material in the medical system and is cheaper and more sustainable than FBS, but culturally less-accepted. People think that eating oneself is cannibalism, which technically this is not,” said Knight.

“Our design is scientifically and economically feasible but also ironic in many ways,” Telhan added.

“We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ [in short: cannibalism] as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are? In the future, who will be able to afford animal meat and who may have no other option than culturing meat from themselves?”

Although only Singapore and the US have so far approved clean meat for sale the market is estimated to be worth $206 million and expected to grow to $572 million by 2025, largely due to the increasing environmental and ethical concerns about the mass rearing of livestock for human consumption. And, as a sign of “faith” in the industry China last year placed a $300 million order for clean meat products with Israeli company Aleph Farms who claimed a while ago to have been the first company to make a lab grown steak.

Then, of course we have other companies who are focusing their efforts elsewhere such and have focused on substituting meat entirely, with Novameat, for example, creating a 3D printed steak from vegetable proteins.

All of which then brings us full circle – as we change the way we produce food we’re going to have some increasingly odd choices to make, but the upshot of all this is that even as scientists do, in some cases justifiably, try and draw attention to some of this new industries oddities we have an increasingly affordable and sustainable way to feed the 11 billion people who will inhabit our planet in 2050 and avoid cataclysmic “food wars” and large scale famine without ever having to kill a single animal. That is once the synthetic protein has been developed anyways …

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

For tens of thousands of years humankind have gotten their meat from animals, now that no longer needs to be the case.

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Every new technology faces many hurdles before it eventually replaces the status quo and becomes the “new” status quo, and it’s the same for so called “Clean Meat” – the same meat you know and love that normally comes from animals but that in this case is made from animal cells that are cultured in bioreactors in labs instead. And if you’re interested in the Future of Food check out my special feature.

Recently there have been a host of companies in the space showing off everything from authentic bacon, fish fillets, pork, and steaks, to beef meatballs, and chicken nuggets – the latter of which is now being rolled out by KFC as part of their “Future Food” project in the US.

Among the many hurdles to overcome there’s the cultural aspect of people simply accepting the new thing as the new status quo, but there are also more practical hurdles such as accessibility, affordability, and, among the other many hurdles – regulation. After all, if a new technology isn’t regulated or approved for use then it doesn’t matter how good or how beneficial it is, it never hits the market.

When it comes to clean meat in the past five years alone the cost per pound of making it has fallen from a staggering $1million to a much more sobering $363, and in the years to come it’s projected to fall to below $5 which will put it on a par with regular supermarket meats – but without the massive environmental impact that traditional meats have, and, because of the way it’s made, an organic label to boot.

Now, in a landmark move and a year after the FDA first approved clean meat in the US as safe to eat, Singapore have just announced they’ve granted US start-up Just regulatory approval to sell their lab grown chicken in the country, and in doing so they’ve become the first government in the world to allow the sale of cultured meat – it’s a truly watershed moment for the new “technology.”

The product, created from cultured chicken cells, has been approved as an ingredient in chicken bites following Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approval, said Just.

Initially, the chicken bites will debut in a Singapore restaurant, with plans for wider expansion into dining and retail establishments in the country, said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Just. The product will be priced at parity with premium chicken, he added.

“We’ve been eating meat for tens of thousands of years, always needing to kill an animal to eat – until now,” he said.

The cultured meat is created in a bioreactor, an apparatus in which a biological reaction or change takes place, and the product has a high protein content and is a rich source of minerals, according to the company, which plans to sell the product under the GOOD Meat brand.

For now, with manufacturing hubs in Singapore and Northern California, the company only has approval to sell the meat in Singapore, but it hopes to expand sales of cultured meat, including cultured beef, into the US and Europe, Tetrick said.

Just already produces a range of non-animal products, including Just Egg, made with mung beans, and a vegan mayonnaise, and the trend toward meat substitutes and plant based protein, already growing in the United States, is also taking hold in Asia.

This year, despite the global economic turmoil triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, plant-based protein startup Impossible Foods secured about half a billion dollars in fresh funding, with investment mostly coming from heavyweight investors in Asia.

California-based Beyond Meat last month unveiled a meatless minced “pork” for launch in China, while Impossible launched its fake beef product in supermarkets in Hong Kong and Singapore in October, hoping to widen its footprint across Asia.

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