WORLD’S FIRST LAB-GROWN MEAT TO MAKE HISTORIC DEBUT AT SINGAPORE RESTAURANT

Wed 16 December 2020:

Lab-grown chicken will soon be available in restaurants in Singapore in a culinary first this weekend after the company behind the product announced its inaugural sale Wednesday.

U.S. startup Eat Just said earlier that its meat had been approved for sale in the city-state as an ingredient in chicken nuggets. The news marks a “breakthrough for the global food industry,” said the company, as firms increasingly try to find less environmentally harmful ways of producing meat.

I’m sure that our regulatory approval for cultured meat will be the first of many in Singapore and in countries around the globe,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just.

Consumption of regular meat is an environmental threat as cattle produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, while logging forests to make way for animals destroys natural barriers against climate change.

Demand for alternatives to regular meat is surging due to concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment. Plant-based substitutes, popularized by the likes of Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Quorn, have been increasingly featured on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.

On Wednesday, the company said it had made its first commercial sale of the product to 1880, a restaurant in Robertson Quay, a posh riverside entertainment centre.

Eat Just chief executive Josh Tetrick said the news “moves us closer to a world where the majority of meat we eat will not require tearing down a single forest, displacing a single animal’s habitat or using a single drop of antibiotics”.

The restaurant will start serving it from Saturday, the company said.

Three cultured chicken dishes will be served, “each bite influenced by a top chicken-producing country in the world: China, Brazil and the United States”, the statement added.

“This is a very exciting collaboration for me,” said Colin Buchan, the restaurant’s executive chef who used to cook for footballer David Beckham.

“I think people are going to love it.”

Meat consumption is projected to increase more than 70 percent by 2050, and lab-grown alternatives have a role to play in ensuring a secure food supply, the company said.

There were concerns that lab-grown varieties would be too expensive, but a spokesman for Eat Just said the company had made “considerable progress” in lowering the cost.

“Right from the start, we will be at price parity for premium chicken at a high-end restaurant,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He did not reveal the price of the nuggets but said they would be launched soon at a Singapore restaurant before other products – including chicken breasts with lab-grown meat – are rolled out.

Eat Just hopes to bring down the cost to below that of conventional chicken in the coming years, the spokesman added.

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.

Singapore, the high-tech city-state, has become a hub for the development of sustainable foods, with start-ups producing goods ranging from lab-grown “seafood” to dumplings made with tropical fruit instead of pork.

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