The product, which was laboratory and industrially formed from cultured chicken cells, was approved as an additive in chicken nuggets after approval by the Singapore Food Agency (SFA).
Initially, laboratory-grown chicken nuggets will only be available in one Singaporean restaurant, but if taken over, the manufacturer plans to expand widely to other canteens and retail outlets in the country, Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, told CNN Business. According to him, the price for this artificial meat will be the same as for more expensive chickens, for example from organic farms.
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“We ate meat for many hundreds, many thousands of years. But we still needed to kill the animal – until now, “Tetrick said.
Cultivated meat is produced in a so-called bioreactor. It is a device in which a biological reaction takes place in the presence of amino acids, sugars and salt. The resulting nuggets have 70 percent of the content of this “meat”, the rest are proteins obtained from mung beans. According to the company, they have a high protein content and are a rich source of minerals. He wants to sell them under the GOOD Meat brand.
As the company currently has production capacity only in Singapore and Northern California, it can only sell nuggets in Singapore, but hopes to expand sales to the US and Western Europe. In addition to artificial chicken, she would like to enrich her offer in the near future with artificial beef, which is created in a similar way.
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Eat Just already produces a range of non-animal products. The most popular are Just Egg vegetarian eggs, made from mung beans and vegan mayonnaise.
People want meat – but not animals
The trend to replace meat, which is particularly evident in Europe and the United States, is already evident in Asia. Despite the global economic chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic, another startup with the same focus, Impossible Foods, has secured about half a billion dollars. The investments came mainly from Asian investors.
The California company Beyond Meat again introduced meatless “pork” for future sales in China last month.
European way
The whole idea of meat made from animal proteins, but because of which animals will not have to die, originated in Europe, where very intensive research into this technology is also underway. At present, it is no longer a problem to create such meat grown only from cells, it even has the right structure and taste, the most difficult is to invent and finance the infrastructure that would allow the production of sufficient quantities.
The main motive for meat production without animals is ethics, but also economics. Global meat consumption has quadrupled since the 1960s. If the world’s population grows from the current seven billion to ten billion over the next 35 years, the world’s diner will need 70 percent more meat than it does now.
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Analysts warn that today’s animal husbandry methods will not be able to meet these ever-increasing needs of humanity. Animal husbandry requires a large amount of land, and animals also need a huge amount of water (the only way to increase meat production is to cut down forests, where cattle are reared), which of course is not sustainable in the long run.
At the same time, there are growing ethical objections to what such large farms look like, and many environmentalists and environmentalists are calling for a reduction in meat consumption. There are studies that claim that it would be enough for US citizens to stop eating meat and climate change to stop completely.
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