Four years ago, the San Francisco-based alternative protein company Eat Just (formerly named simply Just, and Hampton Creek before that) was most well-known for the plant-based egg alternatives that served as the base for Just Mayo, its flagship eggless, vegan mayo substitute. But the company wanted to go further than just finding plants that could mimic the taste and feel of meat products: It pushed into lab-grown, or “cultivated meat,” and started working on growing real chicken from cells. Two years ago, Fast Company tried some of the chicken prototypes at Eat Just’s headquarters. Now, it’s become the first company to gain regulatory approval to begin selling meat grown in a bioreactor.
“This is historically the first approval for meat that didn’t require slaughtering and animal,” says Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, which will soon begin selling its chicken as an ingredient in “chicken bites” in a restaurant Singapore, where the national food regulatory agency issued the approval after a two-year process of detailed review. “When we launch it in a restaurant, that’ll be the first time that it’s sold and consumed.” (An Israeli startup also recently started serving a “cultured chicken” sandwich at its factory, though it’s avoiding the need for regulatory approval by providing the food as free samples to get feedback)
Producing meat from animal cells, rather than raising livestock, can help eliminate the risk of diseases spread in food—or future pandemics spread from farms. It avoids animal cruelty and the overuse of antibiotics. And done right, it can also reduce the carbon footprint of meat production. Eat Just chose to focus on chicken in its early research and development both because chicken is the most consumed meat and because of some of its impacts. Soy grown for chicken feed, for example, has been responsible for deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The company is also developing cultivated beef; beef has the largest carbon footprint of any meat.
Consumers will also need to be willing to make the change. “We can produce tens of millions of pounds and get regulatory approval everywhere, but that doesn’t mean that consumers are going to choose it,” he says. “It’s up to us to make sure that people get how this is different from conventionally-produced meat . . . and how this is a whole lot better from an environmental perspective. You don’t need to deforest acres of rainforest. From a morality perspective, you don’t need to kill a single animal.”
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