In 2020, California-based Good Meat turned the primary firm on the earth to begin promoting lab-grown meat. Its cultured hen has been available on the market 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 acquired approval to promote serum-free meat in Singapore.

The approval was granted by the Singapore Meals Company, 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 method begins with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding these cells a mix of vitamins and naturally-occurring development elements (or, as Good Meat’s course of specifies, amino acids, fat, and nutritional vitamins) in order that they multiply, differentiate, then develop to kind muscle tissue, in a lot the identical approach muscle grows inside animals’ our bodies.

Often, getting animal cells to duplicate requires serum. One of many extra frequent is fetal bovine serum, which is made out of the blood of fetuses extracted from cows throughout slaughter. It sounds a bit brutal even for the non-squeamish carnivore. Determining find out how to replicate the serum’s results with artificial elements has been one of many greatest hurdles to creating cultured meat viable.

“Our analysis and growth crew labored diligently to switch serum with different vitamins that present the identical performance, and their onerous work over a number of years paid off,” mentioned Andrew Noyes, head of communications at Good Meat’s mum or dad firm, Eat Simply. The approval ought to enable for higher scalability, decrease manufacturing prices, and a extra sustainable product.

The corporate is within the technique of constructing an illustration plant in Singapore that may home a 6,000-liter bioreactor, which it says would be the largest within the business thus far and can have the capability to make tens of hundreds of kilos of meat per 12 months.

The serum-free approval “enhances the corporate’s work in Singapore to construct and function its bioreactor facility, the place over 50 analysis scientists and engineers will develop revolutionary capabilities within the cultivated meat area akin to media optimization, course of growth, and texturization of cultivated meat merchandise,” mentioned Damian Chan, government vice chairman of the Singapore Financial Improvement Board.

It gained’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 building of a 200,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Wilson, North Carolina.

This previous November a 3rd participant within the business, Upside Meals, turned the primary firm to obtain a No Questions Letter from the FDA, primarily an approval saying its lab-grown hen is protected for shoppers to eat (although two further approvals are nonetheless wanted earlier than the corporate can really begin promoting the product).

The timing of the aesthetic meat business’s development is handy, although not coincidental; extra shoppers have gotten acutely aware of manufacturing facility farming’s unfavorable environmental affect, and so they’re searching for eco-friendly alternate options. Cultured meat will enable them to eat actual meat (versus plant-based “meat”) with a much smaller environmental affect 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 opponents are hoping, in addition to how lengthy it can take for the merchandise to achieve worth parity with common meat. But when the business’s latest streak of clearing hurdles continues, lab-grown meat could quickly be present in eating places and on grocery cabinets.

Picture Credit score: Good Meat