Some restaurants in the United States may serve lab-grown meat as early as this year. The CEO of Upside Foods, Uma Valeti, is optimistic that cultivated meat could be on the menu within months.
So far, only Singapore has approved lab-grown meat for retail sale. But the United States is set to follow.
In November, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had cleared a cultivated meat product as safe for human consumption. The company hopes to bring its product to US restaurants and grocery stores in the next few years.
Lab-grown meat is a type of food that is produced using cells from animals. The cells are grown in a laboratory to create meat products.
The process involves collecting a sample of animal cells, such as muscle cells, and growing them in a healthy environment. They then form muscle tissue that can be harvested and processed into meat products.
This type of meat is produced without the need for raising and slaughtering animals.
‘It’s meat’
Upside Foods makes cell-cultured chicken by collecting cells from live chickens. They use those cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks.
“So cultivated meat is meat. It’s not a meat alternative. It’s meat that’s grown from real animal cells. So what we do is we take really high-quality animal cells from, let’s say, a cow or a pig or a chicken or a lobster. And we look for cells that can continue to grow outside the animal in a very robust and healthy way,” Valeti told news agency Reuters.
The FDA “agrees that our product is safe for consumers to have,” Valeti said.
Low production
Lab-grown meat companies must attract more funding to increase production. So that they can offer their chicken breasts and beef steaks at a lower cost.
“The challenge right now and getting it into retail or supermarkets is production capacity. We’re going to start out with small production capacity. We are going to start for the restaurants initially,” Valetti said. “But as we scale in the next 3 to 5 years, we want to be able to be in restaurants as well as retailers.”
For now, production is limited. Upside’s facility can produce around 400,000 pounds of lab-grown meat per year. According to the North American Meat Institute, in 2021, 106 billion pounds of meat were produced from killed animal in the US.
So far, the cultivated meat sector has raised nearly $2 billion in investments globally, according to the Good Food Institute (GFI).
The European Union and Israel are also working on regulatory frameworks for lab-grown meat but have yet to approve a product for human consumption.
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