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It’s a historic moment for this nascent industry and for those looking for a cruelty-free steak – the cultured meat, grown in bioreactors, has been approved for sale in Singapore. San Francisco-based Eat Just’s chicken bites will go on sale soon.
The demand for cruelty-free meat has increased in recent years, especially as consumers become more concerned about animal welfare and the impact on the environment. A related, but separate, industry is already thriving: The plant-based ‘meat’ industry is already consuming large portions of the ‘real’ meat industry, with products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods increasingly on the menus from supermarkets and restaurants.
But for those who want real meat without cruelty, a solution is on the horizon.
Cultured meat is meat produced in vitro by cultivating animal cells, rather than on a farm. It’s essentially a form of cellular agriculture – it’s meat, but you ‘farm’ it instead of killing animals. The concept was first popularized in the early 2000s after a seminal research article and has inspired multiple startups working on various types of meat, including Singapore’s own Shiok Meats, which works on crustacean meats. grown in the laboratory.
Today, dozens of new cultured meat companies have sprung up and been successful. It definitely can be done (we just saw a lab-grown meat restaurant open in Israel), and Singapore considers this type of meat important to its food safety. Officially, Singapore has now granted “the world’s first regulatory approval for a cultured meat product,” approving Eat Just’s chicken bites as safe for sale and consumption.
“It was found to be safe for consumption at intended use levels and was allowed for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in Eat Just’s kernel product,” the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said when reviewing the product.
The product will debut as a flavored, breaded chicken nugget in a single restaurant, but production will scale, as Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick puts it that the company wants to make Singapore “the focus” of its global manufacturing.
“I am confident that our regulatory approval for cultured meat will be the first of many in Singapore and in countries around the world,” Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just said in a press release.
It tastes like chicken, Tetrick says, and it’s much more human. No antibiotics were used in the process and the product has fewer microbes than normal chicken, the company says. The problem, however, is still the price.
In 2019, Eat Just said it would sell a serving of farmed chicken for $ 50, which would realistically mean it could only be sold as a novelty food. But now the company says it can sell the nuggets at a price competitive with “premium chicken.” The company also expects prices to drop further as it scales production operations.
This is a major victory for the young lab-grown meat industry, which is expected to be worth $ 80 billion by 2030. In Singapore, Eat Just is already preparing to submit another application, for its beef burgers created in the laboratory. But it is not yet clear whether or not the measure will be extended to other places. Places like North America or the US may not move as fast as the high-tech city-state of Singapore.
But sooner or later, the industry is sure to emerge in other parts of the world. Currently, 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day, and an estimated 77 billion land animals are slaughtered for food each year. By weight, 60% of the Earth’s mammals are cattle, 36% are human, and only 4% are wild.
