I grew up in a household where meat was a central part of every meal. The idea of eating something grown in a laboratory rather than raised on a farm would have seemed bizarre, if not offensive. That background is probably why I find this technology interesting: not because I am a convert, but because I am genuinely uncertain what to make of where it stands right now.
The honest version of the lab-grown meat story is more complicated than either the enthusiastic coverage from 2023 or the dismissive backlash from 2024. Here is what actually happened, and where things stand heading into 2025.
What the Technology Actually Is
The term “lab-grown” or “cultivated” meat is easy to misunderstand, so it is worth being precise. This is not the same as plant-based meat like Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, which use plant proteins engineered to approximate the texture and flavor of animal meat. Cultivated meat is actual animal muscle tissue, grown from animal cells in a controlled environment.
The process starts with a small biopsy — a sample of cells taken from a living animal, which is not harmed in the process. Those cells are placed in a bioreactor, a temperature-controlled vessel, and fed a nutrient solution that provides the building blocks cells need to multiply. Over several weeks, the cells grow into muscle tissue. The result, at least in theory, is structurally identical to conventional meat at the cellular level.
The distinction matters because the regulatory pathway, the consumer perception challenges, and the environmental claims all depend on what exactly you are producing.
The Approvals That Were Supposed to Change Everything
In 2023, the FDA and USDA granted approval to two companies — UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat — to sell cultivated chicken in the United States. This was genuinely significant. Singapore had been the only country to approve cultivated meat for sale, starting with GOOD Meat’s chicken product in 2020. The US approvals expanded the list of jurisdictions where this product could legally reach consumers.
Both companies initially launched at high-end restaurants. UPSIDE Foods partnered with a San Francisco restaurant. GOOD Meat began selling through José Andrés’s restaurant group in Washington, D.C. The coverage was extensive, and the framing was largely triumphant: cultivated meat had arrived.
What happened next was quieter and got less coverage.
What the Market Actually Did
In mid-2024, UPSIDE Foods significantly scaled back its consumer operations. The company laid off a substantial portion of its workforce and shifted focus away from near-term consumer sales. The reasons cited included cost challenges, regulatory complexity, and the difficulty of building out bioreactor capacity at commercial scale.
GOOD Meat continued its restaurant partnerships, but at limited scale that fell well short of what the 2023 coverage implied was imminent.
The cost problem is not a minor obstacle. The first cultivated meat product — a burger patty demonstrated in 2013 by researcher Mark Post — cost approximately $330,000 to produce. By 2023, the cost had dropped to somewhere in the range of $20-50 per serving for chicken, depending on the production method and company. That is a dramatic improvement over a decade, but it is still not competitive with conventional chicken, which costs a few dollars per serving in a grocery store.
The cost reduction that has happened so far has come primarily from improvements in growth media — the nutrient solution cells are fed during cultivation. The next major cost reduction needs to come from scaling up bioreactor production, which requires capital investment that few companies in this space have fully secured.
The Environmental Case: More Complicated Than the Headlines
The environmental argument for cultivated meat is frequently cited as its strongest justification: less land use, less water, fewer emissions. These claims deserve some nuance.
The studies showing large reductions in land use and water are real and the direction is probably correct — cultivated meat does not require raising entire animals, does not require the same land area for grazing and feed crop production, and eliminates some of the most resource-intensive parts of conventional livestock production.
The greenhouse gas picture is more complicated. A 2023 study from UC Davis raised questions about whether cultivated meat, at scale, might actually produce comparable or higher carbon dioxide emissions compared to conventional beef over long time horizons, depending on the energy source used to power the bioreactors. Conventional beef is particularly damaging because cattle produce methane, which is a potent short-term greenhouse gas. But methane breaks down in the atmosphere relatively quickly. CO2 from industrial electricity production accumulates over much longer periods. If bioreactors run on fossil fuel electricity, the climate comparison becomes less straightforward than the simpler summaries suggest.
This is not an argument against cultivated meat. It is an argument for being precise about the claims. The environmental benefits are likely real and potentially large, but they depend heavily on the energy source and the specific production method.
The Regulatory and Political Complications
The US approvals did not end regulatory uncertainty — they were the beginning of a more complicated phase. Several US states have introduced legislation restricting or banning the sale of cultivated meat, framed as protections for conventional agricultural industries. Florida passed a ban in 2024, though enforcement remains contested.
In Europe, the regulatory pathway through the European Food Safety Authority has proceeded more slowly than in the US or Singapore. No cultivated meat products have received EU approval for sale as of early 2025.
The political dimension is worth noting because it affects the realistic commercial timeline. Cultivated meat is not just a food technology story — it is also a story about agricultural economics, incumbent industry lobbying, and consumer politics in jurisdictions where meat production is culturally and economically significant.
What the Companies Getting Attention Are Actually Working On
Despite the UPSIDE Foods setback, the broader cultivated meat sector continues to attract research funding and development activity. A few areas of genuine progress:
Scaffold development. Growing thin sheets of cells is relatively straightforward. Growing structured meat — something with the texture and bite of a steak rather than ground meat — requires cells to grow on a three-dimensional scaffold. Several companies and academic groups are making progress on food-safe scaffolding materials, but this remains an unsolved problem for most whole-cut applications.
Growth media cost reduction. The nutrient solution fed to cells during cultivation has historically included fetal bovine serum, an animal-derived product that creates both cost and ethical complications. Most companies have now moved to serum-free formulations, which is significant progress. Further reducing the cost of growth media remains a major focus.
Bioreactor scale. The largest cultivated meat bioreactors currently in operation hold tens of thousands of liters. Conventional meat processing operates at a scale that would require bioreactors orders of magnitude larger. Scaling the engineering without proportionally scaling the cost is the central challenge for the next phase of the industry.
The Consumer Acceptance Question
Public opinion surveys on cultivated meat have produced inconsistent results, with acceptance varying substantially by country, age group, and how the question is framed. What is clear is that a meaningful fraction of consumers in most countries express reluctance based on the “unnaturalness” of the product — what researchers sometimes call the “yuck factor” or food neophobia.
Whether that reluctance is durable or will erode as the products become more familiar is genuinely unknown. Some analogies are encouraging: pasteurized milk, margarine, and genetically modified crops all faced initial consumer skepticism that moderated over time for a significant portion of the population. Other analogies are less encouraging: some food technologies never achieved mainstream adoption despite being technically functional.
The “naturalness” framing is worth interrogating. Conventional industrial meat production is itself a highly engineered process involving hormone treatments, prophylactic antibiotics, and living conditions that would be difficult to describe as natural in any meaningful sense. But that argument tends to be less persuasive to consumers than cultivated meat proponents hope.
Where Things Actually Stand
Lab-grown meat is a real technology that has achieved regulatory approval in multiple jurisdictions, reached actual restaurant tables in limited quantities, and demonstrated substantial cost reduction over the past decade. These are meaningful accomplishments.
It is also a technology that remains far from cost-competitive with conventional meat, faces regulatory and political headwinds in key markets, has not yet solved the bioreactor scaling problem, and saw its most prominent US producer significantly pull back its commercial ambitions in 2024.
The “Kodak moment for agriculture” framing that was popular in 2022-2023 turned out to be premature. That does not mean the technology will not eventually be commercially significant — it might be, particularly in applications like ground meat where the scaffold problem is less acute. But the timeline has stretched, and the challenges are clearer than they appeared when the first US approvals generated headlines.
If you follow this space, what to watch is not restaurant launches but bioreactor cost curves and what happens with the next generation of growth media. The commercial story will ultimately be determined by whether the economics get there, not by whether the technology works.
Sources referenced:
- FDA/USDA approval documentation for UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat (2023)
- UC Davis study on cultivated meat lifecycle emissions (2023)
- UPSIDE Foods company announcements regarding workforce reduction (2024)
- Good Food Institute industry state of the industry reports
- Nature Food and other peer-reviewed cultivated meat research
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute dietary, investment, or medical advice.
