Lab-grown meat product to hit restaurants in Singapore

U.S. company’s ‘cultured chicken’ approved for sale as ingredient in nuggets, a global first

HONG KONG — First, meat came from farms and forests. Then, it came from factories. More recently, entrepreneurs have been making it from plants.

Some have wondered whether there’s a more advanced approach: Could meat be grown in a laboratory from existing cells? That effort has faced multiple challenges, from skepticism over something that comes from a lab to questions about what governments might think.

The nascent laboratory meat industry won a small victory Wednesday on that last point as a U.S. startup became the first to win a government’s approval — in this case, an announcement by the city-state of Singapore — to sell the fruit of its labs to the public in the form of “cultured chicken.”

The company, Eat Just, is based in San Francisco and describes its product as “real, high-quality meat created directly from animal cells for safe human consumption.” Singapore’s Food Agency said Wednesday that it had approved the product for sale as an ingredient in chicken nuggets.

“This is a historic moment in the food system,” Eat Just’s chief executive, Josh Tetrick, said by telephone Wednesday. “We’ve been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we’ve eaten meat, we’ve had to kill an animal — until now.”

Singapore’s move is “the world’s first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product,” said Elaine Siu, managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit organization that promotes cultivated meat and plant-based substitutes for animal products.

“Anyone in this field would know that this is the world’s first because everyone has been waiting — and trying to lobby and fight for it — for the past few years,” added Siu, whose nonprofit is affiliated with a group with the same name in Washington.

Singapore’s Food Agency said Wednesday that it approved the nuggets after Eat Just submitted a safety assessment to the agency’s “novel food” working group, whose seven members are outside experts on food science, toxicology, nutrition, epidemiology and other fields. The agency includes “cultured or cell-based meat grown under controlled conditions” under its definition of novel foods, along with some species of algae, fungi and insects.

“We’re not aware of other countries that have given approval for cultured meat products so far,” Ginny Tan, a spokesperson for the agency, said in an email.

Tetrick said that an unnamed Singapore restaurant would begin selling the product “soon enough to begin making a reservation,” but he declined to provide any further details. The company has previously said that it would cost $50 to make a single nugget. It now says on its website that the nuggets will be available at “price parity for premium chicken you’d enjoy at a restaurant.”

Tetrick said he hoped that Singapore’s decision to approve his company’s “GOOD Meat” chicken nuggets would spur regulators in other countries to move faster to regulate lab-grown meat.

“It’s not good for what we’re trying to do to make the food system better if Singapore’s the only one that has this approval,” he said.