PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & TESTING
What’s next for the
cultured meat industry?
T
he global cultured meat market is predicted to grow exponentially in the next few decades as it looks to take on the trillion-dollar traditional meat industry, according to a recent report. However, the disruptive innovation faces significant hurdles to overcome as regulatory and technological challenges begin to mount.
Exponential growth forecasted Cultured meat, otherwise known as cultivated meat or cell-based meat, is an emerging technology area that uses cultured animal cells to create meat-like food products. Unlike plant-based meat or other meat analogues, cultured meat is produced from the same cells as conventional meat. It can theoretically provide a replica of the real thing without requiring animal slaughter and at a fraction of the environmental cost. The sector has raised more than US$600 million in funding since 2015, growing from fewer than five companies to over 50 in the same time frame, according to insights from Cultured Meat 2021-2041: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts. The report, produced by IDTechEx, forecasts the global cultured meat market will be worth $1.66 billion by 2031 and $11.13 billion by 2041. According to a recent Market Data Forecast report, that is more than 50 times its current valuation. 72
November/December 2021
Singapore leads the way The cultured meat industry received a significant boost in December 2020, when the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approved a “novel food petition” for cultured chicken produced by Eat JUST to be sold in Singapore as an ingredient in nuggets made by the company. As a city-state with almost no agricultural land, Singapore imports over 90% of its food, making it highly dependent on other countries. To improve the country’s food security, in 2019, the Singaporean government set up the “30 by 30” goal, which aims to produce 30% of the country’s nutritional needs locally by 2030, using technologies including vertical farming and alternative proteins. “The Singaporean government had previously been vocally supportive of cultured meat, and it is perhaps unsurprising that it was the first place to approve a cultured meat product for commercial sale,” IDTechEx published in the report. However, Eat JUST’s cultured chicken is still very much an early-stage product. The company still uses foetal bovine serum (FBS) to produce its cultured cells, an expensive ingredient with high batch-to-batch variability derived from slaughterhouses, meaning that production is unlikely to be scalable in its current form and still partially relies on animal slaughter. The product
www.foodprocessing.com.au
