Future of beef · Cell-grown

Cultured meat

Cultured meat is animal muscle and fat grown from cells in a bioreactor instead of raised in an animal. It has been approved for sale in a handful of countries since 2020, mostly as chicken and in small amounts; a cultured steak with the structure of a real cut does not yet exist on the market.

Also known as: Carne cultivada · Thịt nuôi cấy · Viande cultivée · Kultiviertes FleischLast reviewed 25 Oct 20265 sources

Animal cells, no animal raised

Cultured meat (also cultivated, cell-based or, informally, lab-grown meat) is made by taking a small sample of cells from a living animal or from an established cell line, multiplying them in a nutrient medium and turning them into muscle and fat tissue. The product is animal meat at the cellular level; what changes is that no animal is raised and slaughtered for each batch.

It should not be confused with plant-based meat analogues, which contain no animal cells, or with precision-fermentation ingredients, in which microbes produce a single protein (such as a milk protein or heme). Several commercial products are hybrids: a minority of cultured cells blended with plant proteins for texture and cost.

Biopsy, bioreactor, scaffold

1. Cell sourcing. A biopsy is taken from an animal, or a cell bank is used. Developers work with muscle satellite cells, fibroblasts, fat precursor cells or stem cells; some lines are adapted to divide indefinitely.
2. Proliferation. The cells grow in a liquid culture medium (amino acids, glucose, salts, vitamins and growth factors) inside a sterile bioreactor at body temperature, about 37 °C / 99 °F. Early work used fetal bovine serum; most developers now report serum-free media.
3. Differentiation. Conditions are changed so the cells stop multiplying and mature into muscle fibres or fat cells.
4. Structuring. For ground products the cell mass is harvested and formed. For anything resembling a whole cut, cells must grow on an edible scaffold or be printed in layers, because without blood vessels nutrients cannot reach cells more than a fraction of a millimetre inside a thick tissue.
5. Finishing. The tissue is harvested, often blended with plant ingredients and binders, and packaged like any other meat product.

Approved in a few places, banned in others

Approval has not meant wide availability. Sales have been limited to a few restaurants and short retail trials. In the opposite direction, Italy (2023) and several US states, including Florida and Alabama (2024), passed laws banning the sale of cultured meat. The European Union regulates it as a novel food and had not approved any product by October 2026.

In 2023 the FAO and the WHO published a joint review of the food-safety questions raised by cell-based food (cell lines, media components, contamination, allergenicity), concluding that most hazards are known from other foods and that the open questions are mainly about specific inputs and process controls.

A €250,000 burger in 2013

The first cultured beef burger, presented in London in 2013 by the team of Mark Post at Maastricht University, cost about €250,000 to produce. Costs have fallen by several orders of magnitude since, but published techno-economic analyses still place large-scale production well above the cost of conventional meat. The main drivers are the culture medium (above all growth factors), the capital cost of sterile bioreactors at food scale, and the long, contamination-sensitive growth cycle.

A widely cited 2021 analysis by David Humbird, commissioned by Open Philanthropy, concluded that reaching price parity with commodity meat would require changes in medium cost and bioreactor design that go beyond incremental engineering. Industry estimates are more optimistic; independent ones are more cautious.

No marbling, no whole cut yet

Structure. A steak is not only muscle cells: it is aligned fibres, connective tissue, intramuscular fat (marbling) and a gradient of texture that develops in a living animal over years. No product on the market reproduces a whole cut such as a ribeye; current products are minced, shredded or layered.

Scale. Global meat production is measured in hundreds of millions of tonnes per year; cultured meat output is measured in tonnes. Bioreactor capacity at that scale does not exist.

Environmental footprint. The climate benefit depends on the energy used. A 2019 modelling study by Lynch and Pierrehumbert found that, because carbon dioxide persists while methane decays, cultured meat produced with fossil energy could in the long run warm the climate more than some cattle systems; with low-carbon energy the comparison favours cultured meat.

Acceptance and naming. Labelling rules ("cell-cultivated", "lab-grown") are still being written, and consumer surveys show strong differences by country and age.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

5

1. Post, Mark J. "Cultured meat from stem cells: challenges and prospects." Meat Science 92, no. 3 (2012): 297–301. doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2012.04.008
2. Humbird, David. "Scale-up economics for cultured meat." Biotechnology and Bioengineering 118, no. 8 (2021): 3239–3250. doi.org/10.1002/bit.27848
3. Lynch, John; Pierrehumbert, Raymond. "Climate impacts of cultured meat and beef cattle." Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 3 (2019): 5. doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005
4. FAO; WHO. Food safety aspects of cell-based food. Rome, 2023.
5. Singapore Food Agency. Requirements for the safety assessment of novel foods and novel food ingredients. Singapore.

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