Introduction
What if your next burger didn’t require a single cow to be slaughtered but still had the same familiar taste and texture? Lab-grown meat—also called cultured meat—isn’t science fiction; it’s a reality that’s making its way onto plates worldwide. Grown from real animals’ cells, this technology is promising a future where people can enjoy the taste of meat without the ethical and climate consequences and farmed animals can be spared lives of continuous exploitation.
While this concept might create wariness in some people, we have been growing cells in vitro like this for over a hundred years. It’s nothing new or revolutionary. It’s how some people have children and how we grow cells for medical purposes. It is a problem solver. And to us, it makes perfect sense to apply this process to animal flesh.
There are big challenges for the production and sale of cultured meat however, with recent roadblocks—like scaling-up the technology and navigating government regulations—slowing the industry’s progress toward market disruption.
Cultured Meat: The Science
To make cultured meat, we take the DNA-rich stem cells of an animal and mix it with satellite cells (cells with DNA specific to muscular growth). We then feed and exercise this cell culture inside a bioreactor. Once the cells have proliferated, scientists grow whatever product they are creating around a scaffold, which represents bone, sinew, and connective tissue, just like inside the body of an animal.
This scaffolding is complex, which is why more complicated and unique meat products like steak or pork chops, are currently much harder to create than burgers, mince, or chicken products. In the case of ground meat for example, thousands of individual cells can be grown independently and then combined. But a steak must be grown in its entirety all at once. Perfecting the process requires an exact combination of growth serum, scaffold, and exercise plan—something that has frustrated scientists in cellular agriculture since its inception in 2013.
For a simple video breakdown of the process, head here.
Why Cultured Meat Matters
Our love for eating meat comes at a massive cost. Traditional meat production is a leading driver of climate change, deforestation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss. At least 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including highly potent methane and nitrous oxide, come from farming animals, outstripping every other source except fossil fuels. It also comes with an ethical toll—billions of animals suffer in factory farms year-round and end their days in terrifying slaughterhouses. The system is so unhygienic that vast amounts of antibiotics are used, leading to hundreds of thousands of human deaths each year from superbugs. And still, the diseases that evolve and proliferate on farms cause more sickness and human deaths, while also harboring the potential to unleash the next pandemic.
It’s unethical, dirty, destructive, and inefficient, and it’s time for change.
But changing eating habits is tough. Food is deeply tied to culture, tradition, and industry power. The meat industry spends billions lobbying against change, making meaningful policy shifts an uphill battle. For those who have moved away from animal products, the enormous benefits of a plant-based diet are clear, and highly technological solutions can seem unnecessary, a distraction from the real conversation that needs to be had—but time is running out, and we need alternatives.
Lab-grown meat offers a solution: real meat, that tastes exactly the same as its animal-derived counterpart without the environmental and ethical costs. Beyond sustainability and ethics, cultured meat has health benefits, too. Because it is produced in sterile conditions, there is a reduced risk of contamination. It can also be designed to contain healthier fats and eliminate antibiotics and hormones, making it a cleaner, potentially healthier choice.
This isn’t just about sustainability—it’s about survival. Redefining how we produce food is no longer optional, and lab-grown meat offers a glimpse into a future where ethical and sustainable meat is possible.
Government Approval for Cultured Meat
Getting approval for any novel food is not easy. Until recently, Singapore had been the only country to approve cultured meat for sale. However in the USA, UPSIDE Foods and EAT JUST both achieved FDA approval in 2023 and their long-anticipated products are now reaching consumers via restaurants. There are still further approval steps for the product to go through until it reaches grocery store shelves in the USA, but these initial approvals are a huge step in the right direction for cultured meat.
Government bans are also a factor for cultured meat and are driven by powerful vested interests. Italy’s right-wing government became the first country to ban new cultured meat products in 2023, and many other countries have tabled unsuccessful bans since. Some US states have also attempted bans, but they have been met with resistance from seemingly unlikely sources. A ban in Nebraska, for example, has been resisted by cattle ranchers and meat packers, who stand by their belief in a free-market, and would prefer to welcome the competition head on!
The Future for Cultured Meat
For cultured meat to succeed, companies need to meet consumer demand. Succeeding in areas like taste, cost, health, and sustainability is crucial.
Taste
In 2023, the first version of a cultured chicken product, made by US based company EAT JUST, hit supermarket shelves in Singapore. And following regulatory approval by the FDA, EAT JUST’s cultured chicken was served in China Chilcano restaurant in Washington DC.
This is very much an early version of what cultured meat may look like and contains only a small percentage of cultured meat cells for flavor and texture. The rest of the product is plant-based but benefits from the traditional meat flavor from the cultured cells. This early version has been well received by consumers, who say it tastes very similar to the real thing!
Cost
Headlines that focused on the huge costs of cultured meat have led to misinformation around how expensive it will actually be. The first attempt at a lab-grown burger, unveiled in The Netherlands in 2013, cost an eye-watering $250,000. While the cost has come down significantly since then, cultured meat products are still not cheap to create. But like every novel food, costs are always high in the research, development, and scaling periods. Despite high costs, EAT JUST has already managed to sell its product at price parity with chicken from animals in Singapore—and that is before major scaling up of their product. Time will tell whether it will be able to replicate this parity in the much more competitive and hostile markets of the USA and Europe.
If effective product scaling can be achieved, alongside an increase in demand, then the low-cost potential for cultured meat is huge as it requires far less inputs like feed, water, energy, veterinary care, and housing costs than traditional animal products.
Health
Cultured meat benefits from its lab environment. This means you can adjust the medium in which the living cells are grown, adding certain vitamins and nutrients that could alter and improve its nutritional quality. It is also created in a highly controlled, sterile environment, something that is impossible to achieve on a factory farm. This means no antibiotics, no E.coli, no pathogens, no bird flu—none of the nasty harmful things that come out of animal agriculture regularly.
However, cultured meat cells are identical to the cells in meat, so they come with largely the same nutritional profile. And as we know, eating meat is linked to increased risks of chronic diseases when consumed regularly. Eating plant-based is best for the planet, for animals and us, but the next best option is cultured meat.
Sustainability
The eventual sustainability of cultured meat will depend on the scalability and techniques used.
Due to the huge impact animal agriculture currently has on the planet, it’s highly likely cultured meat will be far more sustainable. However, it has come under scrutiny for being highly energy intensive due to the large bio-reactors required to create cultured meat products at scale. The industry has addressed these concerns by moving away from large-scale pharmaceutical bioreactors and adopting newer technology specifically designed for cellular agriculture that saves energy and factory space.
Think tank RethinkX is also optimistic, stating that large-scale disruption of the energy sector by renewables is likely to coincide with cultured meat’s own market disruption—meaning emissions from energy are much less concerning.
What Cultured Meat Products are Possible?
In theory, anything is possible if you are able to obtain a satellite cell and a stem cell with the DNA of the organism you’re trying to create. The roadblocks for what’s possible lie with the scaffold, growth mediums, and scalability. For example, a cow’s muscle (a steak for example) is very complex, and takes a very advanced scaffold to grow cultured cells around.
The flesh of chickens and crustaceans, however, have a much simpler texture, meaning they are much easier to recreate. This has led to cultured chicken being the first product approved for sale in both Singapore and the USA. Other products like beef or lamb are certainly possible with cellular agriculture, but will take further research, development, and regulatory approval.
Other Markets for Cultured Meat
Outside of food for human consumption, cultured meat could potentially save millions of animals’ lives in the pet food sector. Currently around 20 percent of the meat consumed in western nations (around two billion animals in the USA), is eaten by pets. Without the slow regulatory barriers for human consumption, and the lack of need for a human-proof taste and texture profile, cultured meat is already disrupting the pet food industry.
The UK government approved the technology for use in petfood in 2024, with the first products rolling out onto shelves right now!
Challenges of Cultured Meat
In recent years, cellular agriculture has encountered two major challenges, which many companies are scrambling to overcome, but they are still creating some market uncertainty.
Firstly, the bioreactors for producing the final products, have relied on tech designed for existing industries such as pharmaceuticals. This has restricted the total space and resources available for companies to scale up. To overcome that, companies are now pooling resources to develop tech designed specifically for cellular agriculture, and with promising results.
Secondly, competition in the novel food sectors is emerging. Concepts like precision fermentation are promising simpler, cheaper, more efficient, and equally tasty meat products, as well as disrupting the dairy and egg industries, too. This, alongside other unfriendly global conditions, has resulted in investors’ money going elsewhere, leaving some cellular agriculture companies undervalued and strapped for resources.
Hope is not lost, however. If cellular agriculture companies can overcome their bioreactor issues and begin attracting further investment, there is no reason the sector cannot play a key role in helping us transition away from the reliance on damaging animal agriculture.
Conclusion
With the global population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, finding alternative ways to produce protein is no longer a choice; it’s a necessity. Cultured meat is more than an innovation—it has kick started a revolution in how we think about food.
While challenges remain, from cost and scalability to regulatory approval and consumer acceptance, the progress made so far is undeniable. And the potential benefits make overcoming these hurdles worth the effort.
It’s likely that disruption of traditional animal agriculture will take a long time, with multiple solutions coming into play. If the cultured meat industry can refine its production processes, lower costs, and win over skeptics, it will play a pivotal role in reshaping global food systems.
