Keypoints:
- The approval for a U.S. start-up’s “cultured chicken” product is a small victory for the nascent laboratory meat industry.
- Singapore has granted San Francisco start-up Eat Just Inc. regulatory approval to sell its laboratory-grown chicken in the city-state.
- The chicken bites containing lab-grown meat will debut in a Singapore restaurant before being rolled out more widely across the country.
Singapore grants San Francisco start up Eat Just Inc. regulatory approval to sell its laboratory grown chicken in the city state.
Meanwhile, Singapore becomes the first country in the world to bring this change and initiate the step,the chicken bites containing lab-grown meat will debut in a Singapore restaurant before being rolled out more widely across the country.
Eat said on Tuesdays that the product, created from cultured chicken cells, has been approved as an ingredient in chicken bites following Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approval.
Initially, the chicken bites will debut in a Singapore restaurant, with plans for wider expansion into dining and retail establishments in the country, Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just told CNN Business. The product will be priced at parity with premium chicken, he added.
“We’ve been eating meat for many hundreds, thousands of years, always needing to kill an animal to eat — until now,” he said.
Singapore’s move is “the world’s first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product,” said Elaine Siu, the managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit organization that promotes cultivated meat and plant-based substitutes for animal products.
“This is a historic moment in the food system,” Eat Just’s chief executive, Josh Tetrick, said by telephone on 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.”
“We’re not aware of other countries that have given approval for cultured meat products so far,” Ginny Tan, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an email.
Mr. Tetrick said 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 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.”
The meat business has long faced criticism from animal-rights activists who argue that eating meat is inhumane. The industry has been attracting more scrutiny in recent years for its impact on climate change.
Globally more than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029.
