In 2020, California-based Good Meat turned the primary firm on the planet to start out promoting lab-grown meat. Its cultured rooster has been in the marketplace in Singapore since then, and although it’s nonetheless awaiting FDA approval to promote its merchandise within the US, this week the corporate reached one other milestone when it obtained approval to promote serum-free meat in Singapore.
The approval was granted by the Singapore Food Agency, and means Good Meat is allowed to make use of artificial processes to create its merchandise.
Cultured meat is grown from animal cells and is biologically the identical as meat that comes from an animal. The course of begins with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding these cells a combination of vitamins and naturally-occurring progress elements (or, as Good Meat’s course of specifies, amino acids, fat, and nutritional vitamins) in order that they multiply, differentiate, then develop to type muscle tissue, in a lot the identical means muscle grows inside animals’ our bodies.
Usually, getting animal cells to duplicate requires serum. One of the extra widespread is fetal bovine serum, which is constructed from the blood of fetuses extracted from cows throughout slaughter. It sounds a bit brutal even for the non-squeamish carnivore. Figuring out how one can replicate the serum’s results with artificial components has been one of many greatest hurdles to creating cultured meat viable.
“Our research and development team worked diligently to replace serum with other nutrients that provide the same functionality, and their hard work over several years paid off,” stated Andrew Noyes, head of communications at Good Meat’s dad or mum firm, Eat Just. The approval ought to enable for better scalability, decrease manufacturing prices, and a extra sustainable product.
The firm is within the technique of constructing an indication plant in Singapore that can home a 6,000-liter bioreactor, which it says would be the largest within the trade so far and can have the capability to make tens of hundreds of kilos of meat per 12 months.
The serum-free approval “complements the company’s work in Singapore to build and operate its bioreactor facility, where over 50 research scientists and engineers will develop innovative capabilities in the cultivated meat space such as media optimization, process development, and texturization of cultivated meat products,” stated Damian Chan, govt vice chairman of the Singapore Economic Development Board.
It received’t be the one plant of its sort. Israeli firm Believer Meats opened a facility to supply lab-grown meat at scale in Israel in 2021, and final month began development of a 200,000-square-foot manufacturing unit in Wilson, North Carolina.
This previous November a 3rd participant within the trade, Upside Foods, turned the primary firm to obtain a No Questions Letter from the FDA, basically an approval saying its lab-grown rooster is secure for shoppers to eat (although two extra approvals are nonetheless wanted earlier than the corporate can really begin promoting the product).
The timing of the classy meat trade’s development is handy, although not coincidental; extra shoppers have gotten aware of manufacturing unit farming’s unfavourable environmental influence, they usually’re in search of eco-friendly alternate options. Cultured meat will enable them to eat actual meat (versus plant-based “meat”) with a much smaller environmental influence and no animals harmed in addition.
It stays to be seen whether or not scaling manufacturing will go as easily as Good Meat and its rivals are hoping, in addition to how lengthy it is going to take for the merchandise to achieve worth parity with common meat. But if the trade’s current streak of clearing hurdles continues, lab-grown meat might quickly be present in eating places and on grocery cabinets.
Image Credit: Good Meat