The U.S. Agriculture Department has given the green light to two California-based companies to sell cell-cultivated meat to consumers. The companies plan to roll it out on a small scale in select restaurants, but producing cultivated meat in larger volumes remains a challenge for the industry.
Good Meat, an arm of the food technology company Eat Just, and Upside Foods received grants of inspection from the USDA on Wednesday, allowing them to begin producing and selling cultivated chicken. Earlier in June, the USDA approved labels to call their products "cell-cultivated chicken."
Cultivated meat contains meat grown from animal cells.
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To produce it, companies take a sample of stem cells from an animal, often through a biopsy from a live animal or a fertilized egg.
Those cells are grown in vessels of varying sizes aimed at maintaining the right temperature, along with a mixture containing amino acids, sugars and other nutrients needed for the cells to grow.
The process produces just meat-not complete animals with bones and nervous systems.
After a period of weeks, the cells are harvested and formed into shapes that consumers recognize, such as chicken breasts or meatballs.
Some companies are aiming to make whole cuts of meat-a complex, expensive and time-consuming process.
Others are choosing to blend cultivated meat cells with additional ingredients, such as plant-based protein. This can typically be done with a slurry of cells produced through a simpler process that is cheaper and easier to scale up.
Collecting the initial sample of cells often doesn't hurt the animal. But there are times when a sample is taken from something such as a small shrimp, for example, that doesn't survive.
And to help the cells grow, some companies have often used fetal bovine serum, which is harvested from fetal calves, though they have indicated they might not do so in the future. Upside Foods has said it has developed a mixture to feed the cells that doesn't use any animal components. However, the company isn't using that process to produce its first commercial product, a chicken filet.
José Andrés, the celebrity chef and anti-hunger activist, plans to sell Good Meat's first cultivated chicken at one of his restaurants in Washington, D.C., the company said.
Good Meat became the first company to sell cultivated meat to any consumers when Singapore approved its sale in December 2020.
Upside said it would roll out its first cultivated-chicken product, a filet, at Bar Crenn in San Francisco.
Cultivated-meat companies hope to eventually sell cultivated meat at the same price or below that of conventional meat, but that could be many years away.
Still, the industry has made progress. When Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled for the first time a burger made with lab-grown beef on camera in 2013, it cost $330,000 to make. The CEO of Upside Foods said in 2017 that the company could make a pound of meat for less than $2,400, down from $18,000 in 2016. The company has declined to provide more-recent figures but said it expects to initially sell its product at a premium to conventional meat.
Good Meat's cultivated chicken is for sale one day a week, by reservation only, at Huber's Butchery in Singapore, where its chicken dishes sell "for about the same" as conventional chicken dishes, a company spokesman said.
Upside Foods said its first cultivated-chicken products would be priced at a premium to conventional poultry, but declined to give specifics.
People who sampled cultivated chicken from Upside Foods in 2017, when the company was known as Memphis Meats, gave it good reviews, saying it was tender and tasted like the real thing.
Many people object to the killing of animals for human consumption, something the cultivation process could greatly reduce. People who want to eat meat could do so without worrying about the welfare of animals raised in the conventional meat industry.
There is also an environmental argument: Supporters hope that producing cultivated meat and seafood can help feed more people with a smaller environmental impact since it is expected to use less land and reduce air pollution. The facilities that produce cultivated meat use a lot of energy. Using renewable energy could shrink cultivated meat's carbon footprint further.
Supporters also note that cultivating meat in a controlled environment should greatly reduce the need for antibiotics often given to livestock, in response to concerns about antimicrobial resistance, and cut down on foodborne diseases.
Plant-based meats don't start with animal cells. Instead, components of plants are mixed to try to mimic the taste and texture of meat. Beyond Meat, for example, uses yellow-pea protein, potato starch, canola oil and other ingredients to make burger patties, sausages and nuggets.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, cheered the FDA's stance that Upside Foods's chicken is safe to eat. "We're over the moon to see 'slaughter-less meat' becoming a reality," said PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. However, until cultivated meat is available, the group wants people to give up meat and dairy products.
Although companies can make small quantities of cultivated meat and seafood, it is proving much harder to make large volumes at low cost, a transition that is necessary if it is to become competitive with conventional meat.
Cultivated-meat companies have to battle contamination, which can ruin a batch of meat, and many other technical challenges involved in growing finicky cells in bioreactors. Many elements of the process are expensive, including the equipment and the supplies used to feed the cells, keeping production costs high.
Some traditional meat companies, including Tyson Foods and Cargill, have invested in cultivated-meat startups. Meat companies are under pressure from consumers and investors to reduce their emissions, diminish their reliance on animal drugs and to treat livestock more humanely. Officials at those companies have said they view cultivated meat as another option to offer alongside conventional meat.
Cargill believes the cultivated-meat industry has shown promising progress. However, the company sees scaling up production and high costs as continuing challenges and says it expects it will be the mid-2030s before the meat is produced in significant volumes.
Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com and Jesse Newman at jesse.newman@wsj.com