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June 21, 2023 was a historic day for cultivated meat. After the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted inspection clearance to Upside Foods and Eat Just, the two companies were able to officially bring their grown chicken products to the market.
The industry has been waiting for this federal announcement since 2013, when Mark Post created the first burger product using cultured cells.
Both companies boast the ability to create products that look, taste and feel like traditional animal-based meat, but are better for users and the planet.
However, the past year has been very complex for the industry. Between limited access to capital and political obstacles, the future of farmed meat appears very uncertain.
“Access to capital has definitely strengthened,” said Dr. Elliott Schwartz, senior scientist for cultivated meats at the Good Food Institute, in an interview with Food Dive.
“Governments in particular have a big role to play now in seizing the opportunity to invest in research and development and infrastructure for growing meat,” he said.
Access to capital will be a challenge for the industry in the coming years, but philanthropists are helping. For example, Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos opened the Alternative Protein Center of Excellence at North Carolina State University.
One step forward, two steps back?
After Upside Foods and Eat Just reached the final stages of the U.S. government's approval process for sales, major California companies The company's products are making their U.S. debut in two restaurants run by celebrity chefs.
Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn introduced Upside Foods' chicken at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, while acclaimed chef Jose Andres introduced Eat Just's Good Meat chicken at one of his restaurants in Washington, D.C.
However, both restaurants discontinued serving the product several months later. The original details of the partnership were unclear, but both companies said the restaurant launch was intended to garner feedback from consumers.
Crenn's partnership with Upside Foods was t.o Luxurious food service spaceCOO Amy Chen told Food Dive in a previous interview.
By February last year, Bar Crenn had taken over after China Chilcano removed Eat Just's farmed chicken from its menu. Last place for U.S. consumers to get farmed meat.
“In the case of Upside Foods, the product they launched was a structured chicken breast product, which is 99 percent cultured animal cells, which is difficult to manufacture,” Schwartz said. “It was a monthly product for them. The expansion of that product didn’t work as well as they had hoped.”
Due to the high cost of producing primarily cultivated products, many companies have created hybrid products containing a mixture of cultivated animal cells and other plant-based proteins.
Eat Just's Good Meat in May alliance With premium grocery store Huber's Butchery Singapore is selling a new product, 'Good Meat 3', which combines 3% of cultivated chicken with other vegetable proteins. According to Eat Just, Good Meat 3 products have allowed the company to lower production costs and sell its products at competitive prices.
Schwartz said this is how the industry can move forward because these hybrid products are much cheaper to produce.
Upside Foods, where 99 percent of its first cultured chicken was cultured cells, is now reworking the product to be closer to a hybrid, Schwartz said. So the company will have to wait until it gets regulatory approval again.
“There are a lot of companies in the U.S. that have been waiting for regulatory approval for quite some time,” Shwartz said.
He said part of the wait is due to a change in staff responsible for food safety in grown meats at the Food and Drug Administration. “Because we changed evaluators, it took some time to refine how quickly they could review and approve applications.”
As for why Upside Foods and Eat Just are no longer available to U.S. consumers, Schwartz said it’s hard to say what motivates individual companies, but the goal with initial product approval is always to get consumer feedback and then adjust strategy accordingly.
Upside Food in February Construction of the production plant nicknamed Rubicon has been halted.187,000 square foot facility It will be one of the largest planned plants, with initial production capacity to produce millions of pounds of bioreactor-brewed meat per year.
According to the report, CEO Uma Valeti instead wanted to focus on the lower-cost Emeryville, California, facility. In an email seen by WIRED, Valeti said the company was making “selective role eliminations” and “other changes” that would affect 16 people across the organization.
In the meantime, Eat Just said it had been modified. There are plans to build a large-scale US facility with ten 250,000 liter bioreactors. “We are not currently attempting to raise funds to establish large-scale aquaculture facilities.”
Instead, Eat Just will focus on process development at its plant in Alameda, California, and developing new products that the company claims will make it easier to scale large scale.
Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrik told AgFunderNews in March: The company has never sold any of its grown chicken into the United States. After a small restaurant trial last summer, Consumers will continue to sell the product on a smaller scale in Singapore.
Overseas expansion
While Eat Just and Upside Foods have halted or slowed down production in the U.S. and overseas in Israel and Singapore, other food tech startups are also making progress.
Last year, Israeli company Aleph Farms received approval to sell in Israel, a company called Vow received approval for its product in Singapore, allowing it to be sold in two restaurants, and Good Meat sold its hybrid-farmed chicken products in Singapore.
In stark contrast to sales in the United States, consumers in Singapore can now go to the grocery store and walk home with raised chicken products.
“One of the key data points is that there are dozens of other applications under consideration in the U.S. and Singapore, so there are a lot of companies waiting for approval and a cluster of companies moving into production,” said Schwartz.
economically and now politically bottleneck
like Schwartz said it was “disappointing” to see politicians taking a stand on consumer choices about food, with political issues holding the industry back. He said this should not be controlled.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he's saving the beef industry from crisis. “Global Elite” when he does On May 2, a bill was signed into law making cultivation illegal. Meat of the Sunshine State.
Soon after, Alabama became the second state to ban lab-grown meat.
Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming have also all implemented standards requiring farmed meat producers to clearly state that their products do not contain animal ingredients.
“The concern about existing industries is clearly veiled, and the kind of protectionism that you see in a statement would say that they are concerned about safety,” Schwartz said.
But supporters of the ban, which would ban the sale and production of cultivated meat products, say: It protects livestock ranchers and farmers and prohibits the “elitist” class from promoting unnatural foods.
“What this really does is it removes consumer choice and stifles innovation in new and promising technologies,” said Schwartz. “I think there is a useful analogy if you look at the history of technological development in general.
“For example, we used to make ice from frozen lakes in the North and ship it to cities across the United States. When refrigeration technology was first invented that allowed ice to be made without relying solely on natural climate processes and cold. “People actually had a lot of pushback on that,” said Schwartz.
