What’s New?
U.S startup Eat Just has received approval from Singapore to sell the company’s lab-grown chicken meat. According to the startup, this is the world’s first regulatory for lab-grown meat and this makes Singapore as the first country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat. The company said that the meat will be sold as nuggets and had previously fixed their cost at $50 each.
Clean Meat?
Lab-grown meat is also called clean meat. How do they make it? Firstly, a muscle sample is taken from an animal. Technicians collect stem cells from the tissue, multiply them dramatically and allow them to differential into primitive fibres that then bulk up to form muscle tissue. From one sample from a cow, one can produce 800 million strands of muscle tissue, which is enough to make 80,000 quarter pounders.
When all these strands are layered together, we get meat. The meat can then be processed using standard food technologies. The works are being done to make lab-grown beef, chicken and duck products. Scientists are also experimenting with the same process of cell agriculture to produce milk, eggs and leather.
Is It Vegan?
Lab-grown meat is NOT vegan because the ingredients needed to produce the synthetic meat are all obtained from animals. At present, it is estimated that around 130 million chickens and 4 million pigs are slaughtered every day for meat. But the important thing about lab-grown meat is that it is cruelty-free because it doesn’t need any animals to be slaughtered.
The Industry
When the ‘Zero Waste Movement’ became widely known, many people switched to plant-based diets to reduce their carbon footprint on the planet. A lot of people reduced their meat intake and joined the Meatless Monday movement. At present, the hashtag meatlessmonday has nearly 900,000 posts on Instagram. So, we believe the concept of consuming an animal without killing an animal would become more popular than ever in the upcoming years.
Even though it cost about $325,000 to produce the first lab-made hamburger in 2012, the cost to make cultured-meat will continue to decline, thanks to the advancements in technology. During an interview on an Australian radio show, Mosa Meat projected that the price could be $80 per kilogram if they are able to reach large-scale production. So, in the future, lab-grown meat could become a tight competition for the actual meat industry.
Besides this, industry experts told The Guardian, besides Eat Just, other companies including Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms might do well in the future as they were working on textured products like steaks. These companies were able to produce considerable amounts of lab-grown meat from the start.
A recent report from the global consultancy AT Kearney projected that most meat in 2040 would not come from dead animals. Another estimation by Barclays states that the alternative meat market could be worth $140 billion by 2029. So, it looks like this industry will continue to grow in the upcoming years.
All in all, Singapore allowing the sale of lab-grown meat is a big moment for the entire industry. We believe that many other companies will launch similar products and the days when we would be reaching for lab-grown chicken nuggets on the supermarket shelves are not so far in the future!
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