Huber’s Butchery in Singapore’s lush Dempsey Hill is the only restaurant in the world selling lab-grown meat, but the supply is so limited there are just six servings — cultivated chicken in a salad or on kebab sticks — only on Thursdays.
Two years after Singapore approved lab-grown meat for human consumption, mass production has yet to start.
The slow progress is mainly due to high production costs and underscores challenges facing the nascent industry, but early signs show that gourmet products could turn a profit sooner than everyday meats such as chicken.
Photo: Reuters
As of last year, Singapore had lured around 30 companies working on alternative proteins, looking to improve its food security. The city-state imports 90 percent of its food and wants to cut that to 70 percent by 2030.
So far, US start-up Eat Just’s chicken on Huber’s menu is the only lab meat product available.
The technological, regulatory and scale barriers to entry for cultivated meat are very high compared with plant-based meat, said Didier Toubia, CEO of Israel’s Aleph Farms, which cultivates beef steak.
Cultivated meat is derived from small samples of cells from livestock, which are then fed nutrients, grown in enormous steel vessels called bioreactors, and processed into something that looks and tastes like a real cut of meat.
“I think we won’t see many companies ... succeed and going into the market, which will also prevent the commoditization of cultivated meat products,” Toubia said.
Advances in manufacturing have helped several firms cut production costs by as much as 90 percent from when they first started years back, industry executives said.
Eat Just has made “significant progress” in cutting costs for each chicken nugget from US$50 previously, but has not said by how much.
“It’s too high and it’s embarrassing... We lose money every time someone enjoys our cultivated chicken,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said.
Huber’s sells the Eat Just cultivated chicken meals for about S$19 (US$14).
Costs remain so high that Eat Just has pushed out its forecast for turning a profit to the end of this decade, nine years later than previously projected.
Hong Kong-based Avant Meats is more bullish than Eat Just, with ambitions to make a premium food: cultivated fish maw.
Fish maw is the swim bladder of a fish, a delicacy prized in China that can fetch up to thousands of dollars per kilogram, depending on its grade.
The company is awaiting regulatory approval from Singapore for its product, and plans to build a pilot plant to start making it early next year.
Avant Meats CEO Carrie Chan (陳解頤) said the company can make cultivated fish maw for the same price as conventional fish maw and expects to be able to sell it for about the same price as the premium natural product.
“We are likely to have some margin on the gross level... We’re not subsidizing ourselves,” Chan said.
Others are catching up in a market that McKinsey expects to grow to US$25 billion by 2030.
After raising a record US$5.1 billion in 2021, the alternative protein sector faces a tough funding outlook, due to a sharp deterioration in demand for plant-based meat, weak economic conditions and low visibility for near-term profitability, the Good Food Institute research group has said.
However, the companies that do succeed would have a huge impact on the food system, said Gautam Godhwani, managing partner at venture capital firm Good Startup.
“And I think we’re going to create very, very big businesses,” Godhwani said.
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