Lab-Grown Meat: Is it the Way of the Future?

Back in December, a high-end Singaporean restaurant made history as the first restaurant in the world to serve lab-grown meat.

This came just weeks after Singapore became the first government to approve lab-grown meat for human consumption in late November.

GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken is a product of US cultured meat company, Eat Just, that also makes other meats and egg substitutes. To add to the brand's credibility, Eat Just was the first company to be approved to sell a lab-grown, or cultured, chicken product.

The chicken was served at the restaurant 1880 in Singapore as part of a sample meal, which included bao buns with crispy sesame cultured chicken and spring onion, phyllo puff pastry with cultured chicken and black bean puree, and a crispy maple waffle with cultured chicken with spices and hot sauce.

Bookings for the meal were quickly snapped up, and the restaurant is planning to add a lab-grown chicken meal—at a similar price point to a premium conventional chicken dish—to its menu this year.

Eat Just is a California-based start-up founded in 2011 by childhood friends CEO Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk, who wanted to overhaul the way we eat in a way that would appeal to committed carnivores. Initially, they made plant-based egg substitutes such as JUST Mayo and JUST Egg. After success in making alternatives, the brand started developing cultured chicken using animal cells in 2016.

“This historic step, the first-ever commercial sale of cultured meat, moves us closer to a world where the majority of the meat we eat will not require tearing down a single forest, displacing a single animal’s habitat or using a single drop of antibiotics,” said Tetrick of the poultry milestone.

“Eat Just is paving the way for the cellular agriculture industry, which has the potential to completely transform our food systems today to make them more sustainable and humane,” added Patrick Morris, Eat Just’s parent company CEO of Eat Beyond.

“The end product, cultured meat, is still fairly expensive as production costs are high, but once the cost of production can be decreased, I believe that we will see this industry grow rapidly in the near future, it is only a matter of time,” added Morris.

How Is Meat Grown from Cells?

To create GOOD Chicken, a small number of cells are taken from real poultry. These are fed the same nutrients a real animal needs to develop: Amino acids, carbohydrates, minerals, fats and vitamins. The cells are put into a bioreactor machine that helps them to grow rapidly—the whole process takes about two weeks, as opposed to the seven to eight weeks from hatching to slaughter of live animals.

Eat Just has manufacturing facilities in and Singapore to produce GOOD Chicken but, due to the current limited production, it’s extremely expensive per kilo. Estimates put the price of cultured meat at between $500 and $2,500 a kilogram. However, the brand is confident that as approvals increase and demand scales up, it will eventually become as cheap or cheaper than raising traditional meat.

Eat Just, now valued at approximately $2.58 billion, is working hard to get regulatory approval from other countries, starting with the US, but admits it’s a long process. The FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have allowed cell-based seafood since 2019, but cultured meat, as plant-based meat does, is likely to face a strong campaign of opposition from animal meat producers.

Eat Just isn’t alone—around the world, other companies are doing similar things with meat in a lab. Supermeat.com, in Israel, is also making chicken, and US companies Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms are working on steak.

A recent report from AT Kearney predicted that most meat consumed by 2040 would not come from dead animals, which would go a long way to addressing the health, environmental and animal welfare issues that are caused by the intensive way we currently produce meat.

If we can reduce all that harm without giving up a decent steak, then full steam ahead.

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