The Country Where You Can Buy Lab-Grown Meat

SINGAPORE — It was an extraordinary moment in the history of food, and perhaps even humanity: in May, a Singapore store began selling lab-grown meat directly to the general public.

One Saturday, customers at Huber’s Butchery watched as a chef fried filets — 3 percent of which came from chicken cells and the rest from plant protein — and served them in taco shells with avocado, pico de gallo and cilantro.

It looked, was cooked and tasted like chicken. Sascha Wenninger, 39, put three packages of the meat in his shopping cart. “I like eating meat and if I can do it without cruelty to animals, then that’s ideal,” he said. Others weren’t as thrilled with the lab-grown meat. “Why eat something artificial when you can get a fresh, live chicken from nature?” said Philippe Ritoux, 58.

In recent years, Singapore has become the center of this utopian—some might say dystopian—future. The city-state, which is smaller than New York, has spent tens of millions of dollars researching new ways to produce food because it has very little land to grow and imports 90 percent of its food. It has explored urban and vertical farming, approved insects for human consumption and given generous subsidies to cultured meat startups.

Singapore became the first country to approve a lab-grown, or “cultured meat,” product for commercial sale in 2020 (the U.S. followed suit two years later, but Florida banned it in May) and has since greenlit other futuristic products, including a protein-rich powder synthesized from thin air and a concoction that doesn’t require animal cells to grow meat in a lab. “Before Singapore, cultured meat was completely science fiction,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just, the company behind the cultured meat sold at Huber’s.

Therefore, any success in Singapore can have global implications.

However, many experts say lab-grown meat has failed to live up to the hopes of replacing traditional meat and helping to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gases emitted during animal farming.

The price of a quarter-pound bag of cultured meat at Huber’s — 7.20 Singapore dollars, or about $5.30 — is a sign of how incredibly expensive it is to produce.

“There are huge scalability challenges between where we are and where we need to get to, and there is no guarantee that those scalability challenges will be solved,” Tetrick said.

Partly for this reason, funding sources for lab-grown meat startups are shrinking.

Before the retail launch, the cultured meat in Singapore was only available in-house at Huber’s. As of January 2023, Huber’s was selling a sandwich with fries and a mixed salad and a pasta dish with spring greens and orecchiette. Both dishes cost S$18.50 and were heavily subsidized by Eat Just’s subsidiary, Good Meat.

Last October, I tried a sandwich with fries that was delicious, but hard to fully rate because the chicken was cut into tiny strips and generously slathered with mustard sauce.

The chicken served at Huber’s starts with a small sample of cells. They are placed in temperature-controlled stainless steel vessels known as bioreactors at a factory run by local company Esco Aster. They are fed a mix of amino acids, fats, vitamins and minerals to mirror the nutrients the chicken consumes outside. Once a significant number of cells have been grown, they are harvested and processed with plant proteins at the Food Technology Innovation Center in Singapore.

Andre Huber, chief executive of Huber’s, said he wasn’t a fan of Good Meat’s original offering, chicken nuggets. But 18 months later, in September 2022, when he tried the brand’s chicken breast, he discovered the texture was “maybe 80 to 90 percent close to the real thing.”

He added: “And the taste was perfect. I mean, it tasted like chicken, just like the real thing.”

But while Huber has been selling cultured meat, he hasn’t been serving it in recent months because Good Meat stopped supplying it to his kitchens. The company said that’s part of its normal cycle in Singapore, where it has always “produced and stopped” production. Good Meat, which is embroiled in a legal dispute with a supplier, has not yet acted on plans to open Asia’s largest cultured meat plant in Singapore last year.

Singapore remains an attractive market for other companies.

Didier Toubia is the co-founder of Aleph Farms, a company that produces farmed steaks in Israel. He said the company decided to produce beef because, of all the different types of livestock farming, cattle farming is the most intensive in terms of land and water use and climate impact. At the same time, higher temperatures in some areas are reducing the ability of cows to reproduce.

In January, Aleph Farms — based in the city of Rehovot — won approval from Israel to sell its thin-cut steaks. That same month, a rabbi certified the meat as kosher. Time magazine described it as tasting like steak but “without the guilt.” Aleph Farms said it is also close to getting approval to sell its cultured meat in Singapore.

The world needs a “plan B,” Toubia said.

Part of the solution, he said, could be cell-based meat, which would reduce the impact of livestock farming on land, water and the climate. Aleph Farms is exploring the possibility of building factories in Singapore and Thailand.

Singapore is constantly worried about securing its future. Water used to be the country’s biggest concern; now it’s food. The latest shock came during the pandemic when Malaysia, one of Singapore’s biggest food sources, banned chicken exports to the city-state.

For this reason, the Singapore government is focused on improving the feasibility of producing alternative proteins. In a call for research grant applications, the Singapore Food Agency said its “ambitious” goal is to reduce the cost of producing cultured meat from $120 per kilogram to $6-$17 per kilogram by the end of the decade.

Some in the meat industry believe chicken could sell for $30 a kilogram during this period. Xiangliang Lin, CEO of Esco Aster, is one of them.

He added that to achieve this, a large-scale public-private partnership was needed along the lines of Gavi, an organization that made vaccines cheap by buying them in bulk for developing countries.

Esco Aster, a contract producer of cultured meat, has received “very generous subsidies” from the Singapore government, said Dominic Chen, a company director. Rent, he added, “is very, very cheap, basically free.”

Meatable, a Dutch company that hopes to sell products such as sausages, dumplings and pulled pork, plans to invest about $88 million in Singapore. Its co-founder, Daan Luining, said Meatable can now grow a pork loin in four days. It typically takes eight months to grow a pig.

Luining was one of the researchers who produced the burger in the lab in 2013 for $325,000. Reviews were not kind: it was dry and tasteless, with one verdict comparing the taste to “animal protein cake.”

Luining said he couldn’t have imagined the current evolution 10 years ago. He added that people asked him if his venture made sense, but now many companies around the world are using different technologies to bring products to market. “It’s really come a long way,” he said.