Lab-Grown Meat Has Been Approved For The Public To Buy For The First Time
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Singapore will be the first country to greenlight the sale of lab-grown meat to consumers.
The Singapore Food Agency has given the stamp of approval to plant-based alternative developer Eat Just’s cell-cultured chicken to be sold in the nation in the near future.
The company had been working towards the endorsement for two years. The product finally passed the standards for poultry meat after safety and quality inspections.
Eat Just, known for its plant-based egg alternative, uses bioreactors to produce cultured meat. The process begins with stem cells from the fat or muscle of an animal, placed into a culture medium that will feed the cells. The medium will then be put into 1,000-liter bioreactors to facilitate the cell’s growth.
The company’s CEO Josh Tetrick compared the process to brewing beer, although the results are vastly different.
The “chicken bites” consist of high protein content, a diversified amino acid composition, and a low microbiological content like salmonella and E. Coli. They will not include antibiotics.
The plant-based meat will be sold under the company’s new Good Meat Brand and will be made available in a restaurant in Singapore soon.
“We’re going to start out with a single restaurant and then scale out to five, 10, 15 and then eventually into retail,” Tetrick commented on the product’s expansion, per CNBC. “The infrastructure required to do it is primarily the bioreactors, so we’ll eventually be moving to 5,000, 10,000, and 20,000 liters.”
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture have been supervising cell-based food alternatives since 2019. However, CNBC noted that the approval for cultured meat might take a long time in America as there will be resistance from traditional meat producers like the US Cattlemen’s Association.
Image via Business Wire
[via CNBC, cover image via Business Wire]
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