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Why Isn’t Cultivated Meat on Our Dinner Plates?

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In 2016, we wrote about the excitement consumers and investors had for a new type of protein. By 2013, investors enthusiastically poured $3 billion into this new technology hoping for traction with consumers and lower production costs. This led many of us to assume we would be eating burgers, fish and chicken grown in bioreactors by 2025. But that has not materialized.

While some companies are making slow progress, the technology is not leaping forward as planned due to consumer perception, state regulatory blockades, and cost of production compared to regular meat.

A large impediment is the regulatory dichotomy between the U.S. government and individual states. While the FDA and the USDA have approved cultivated meat from UPSIDE Foods, some states have banned cultured meat for human consumption.

First, let’s ask: “Is it safe to eat?”

Learning how cultivated meat is made is the first step in understanding this process.

A biopsy is taken from an animal or bird. These cells are put in bioreactors, along with nutrients to help them grow. The ‘vitamins’ used to proliferate the cells consist of amino acids, glucose, vitamins, inorganic salts, along with protein growth factors. This recipe is very similar to what is produced by an animal’s metabolism to make them grow.

The objective is to have the same, or better, nutritional value as cattle, chickens, pork or fish. After the cells have grown into muscle fibers, they are considered meat…  just like the kind from a cow or chicken.

The FDA and the USDA worked closely with various cultivated meat companies to ensure that the processes used to produce meat are safe and lawful under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.  They have also held public meetings to ‘better understand the science of animal cell culture technology, discuss potential hazards and labeling considerations, and to listen to consumer concerns.”

Upside Foods was the first for federal approval with their chicken products. Focusing on cultivated chicken, they are one of the most well-funded and recognizable companies in the sector. They built one of the first U.S. large-scale cultivated meat facilities and are focused on regulatory pathways and premium chicken products, as well as beef and duck.

“We make the chicken chickens dream about! Our cultivated meat is grown in a controlled environment with no need to raise and slaughter billions of animals.”

– Upside Foods

Some advocates argue that cultivated meat may be considered safer and more sustainable — a selling point for health and environmentally-conscious consumers concerned about hormones, antibiotics, and effects on the earth.

But social media can cloud the landscape among consumers, too, with claims like “cultivated meat causes ‘Turbo Cancer’ because the cells are immortal.” Statements like this are false. To make cultivated meat without constantly running biopsies on animals, scientists use cells that can divide indefinitely. While cancer cells also do this, that’s where the similarity ends.

Furthermore, by the time the meat hits your plate, those cells are dead. And even if they weren’t, your stomach acid destroys them instantly. You cannot catch cancer from eating a cell.

Get ready for your pop quiz! Would you eat cultivated meat?

Continue reading and then answer a few questions at the end.

States banning Cultured Meat

Despite its safety, seven states are banning cultured meat, it seems, to protect their farmers and ranchers who are growing traditional meat.

Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

The result is a patchwork of contradictory rules.  It is currently legal to serve cultivated chicken in a high-end restaurant in San Francisco but selling that same chicken in Miami could land you with significant fines.

Here is the current breakdown of the “meat map”:

Given that cultured meat is such a small player in the overall protein market today, it seems unlikely that it is about to put cattle ranchers and poultry producers out of business.  In discussing this with Uma Valeti, CEO of Upside Foods, he equates this technology to similarities to the energy sector.

 “The world needs to meet its energy needs both reliably and sustainably. That is why wind and solar power have been introduced into the energy markets.

This concept is like cultivated meat as part of the global protein market. The difference is that not one state is shutting down wind and solar to protect the energy companies.”

– Uma Valeti, CEO of Upside Foods

He has a point. Well-known energy companies like Chevron, Shell, and BP have embraced wind and solar as part of their energy strategy.

The same applies to the meat industry.

In fact, these companies are some of its biggest supporters and investors.

More people mean more protein. By 2034, the global population will grow an extra 600 million people to 8.8 billion, with protein needs projected to grow to 406 million metric tons from 351 million in 2024.

Who are the players?

As of today, there are at least 10 companies that believe the future innovation of meat belongs in the lab.

Whether it is chicken, beef, shrimp, or bluefin tuna, they all look at cultivated meat with an eye toward the planet.  The science is proven—we can grow meat in a lab, sustainably.

“Rather than raising whole chickens, pigs, or cows, we grow only the meat we want to eat—directly from real animal cells.

At scale, it will be a more humane and future-friendly way to grow high-quality food for meat lovers everywhere.”

– Upside Foods

Good Meat also focuses on plant, human, and animal well-being, stating that “any choice we make affects families across the globe. Our health and our planet’s health are deeply connected.”

But it is not just the solely-focused companies that are interested in alternative protein.  The large beef and chicken companies are, as well.

  • Believer Meats, an Israeli cultivated meat company back by Tyson Foods, recently filed for bankruptcy due to funding and operational issues, despite having been close to success with a safety confirmation from the FDA.
  • JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, bought a majority stake in a Spanish company, Biotech Foods
  • Cargill invested in UPSIDE and is backing Aleph Farms, which is focused on growing complex beef steaks.

Granted, this market is small.

Cultivated meat is only 0.002% of the global protein market cap. And if we were to look at sales, it is 0.000003%.

However, research firms find the market ripe for significant growth.

McKinsey projects a positive 2030 forecast for cultivated meat demand, while Barclays, Euromonitor, and A.T. Kearney see a much larger market for these products by 2040.

What does the consumer say?

Here is where it gets interesting.

Statista carried out a global survey in 2023 asking consumers whether they were willing to try cultured meat. 62% said yes, 38% said no.

The 62% who were willing to try it have various environmental and animal welfare reasons.

However, Mintel’s report was a little less optimistic.

They noted that consumers were concerned about how cultivated meat fit into their country’s culture, especially in Europe.  About 45% of French and Spanish participants were concerned about traditions and culture. The rest were undecided.

The UK was a little more in line with the global survey of Statista where 63% of the younger generations were willing to try it.

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Transcript: Why Isn’t Cultivated Meat on Our Dinner Plates?

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Okay, so imagine this for a second. You’ve got a revolutionary technology, right? And something like $3 billion gets poured into it. And not only that, but the federal government gives it the absolute highest safety deal of approval, the whole green light.

So, you’d logically assume that product, whatever it is, would be on store shelves everywhere.

You absolutely would. We are talking, of course, about cultivated meat.

And back around what 2016, the excitement for this lab grown protein was, I mean, it was explosive.
Everyone was talking. And investors just put massive capital into it. All based on the idea that by 2025, we’d all be, you know, picking up chicken breasts or ground beef grown in a bioreactor. Here we are. It’s past that deadline.

And if you go look in your local grocery store, that cultivated chicken is nowhere to be found.  Conspicuously absent. It’s barely even present in the U.S. market…at all. 

And that absence is exactly why we’re doing this deep dive.

It’s just so fascinating. The journey from the lab bench to your dinner plate is just well, it’s stalled in this perplexing limbo.

And it’s not just a technology problem.

Not at all. It’s a collision of intense political blockades, surprisingly tricky financial hurdles, and yeah, that everpresent challenge of what consumers actually think.

Okay, let’s unpack this. Our mission today is to figure out what is stopping a technology that scientifically and federally has been given the go-ahead. We’re looking past the hype, way past it.

We want to analyze this bizarre contradiction between the political talk and the cold, hard investment facts we pulled from the sources.

And before we get into the politics, we really have to be crystal clear on what this stuff even is. Because that term lab grown, it’s been, let’s just say…it’s been weaponized on social media.

That’s a great place to start. And just to be clear for everyone, we are not talking about a plant-based substitute. That’s a whole different thing you can already buy.

Totally different. Cultivated meat is actual animal protein. It comes from animal cells. It has the exact same biological structure as the meat you’d buy from a butcher. And that’s the key point.

The process is kind of elegant in its simplicity. But it’s really complex to execute. It starts with a completely harmless biopsy from a high-quality animal or bird. So you’re just taking a few cells, just a few building blocks, and those cells are then put into these big vessels called bioreactors.

And I think for a lot of people, that’s where the image gets a little weird. Big steel tanks, right? But you should think of them more like the fermentation tanks used to make beer or yogurt. Just super clean, high-tech versions optimized for muscle cells.

So that leads to the question. What are you feeding these cells inside the tanks? What’s the ingredient list for my dinner?

Well, they need a very specific growth medium. It’s basically a nutrient-rich broth.

A cocktail of sorts.

Exactly. It has essential nutrients like amino acids, glucose for energy, vitamins, inorganic salts, and some specific protein growth factors. The whole goal is to get the cells to multiply and then turn into actual muscle fibers.

So, you’re basically mimicking what happens inside an animal’s body.

The recipe is designed to copy the metabolic processes that happen naturally.

So the goal, the end product is something that’s nutritionally identical or maybe even better than traditional meat because you can control every single input.

And that control is exactly why the federal government got on board.

Both the FDA and the USDA, right? The FDA handles safety. The USDA does labeling and inspection and they have both approved cultivated meat. Companies like Upside foods, they were the first to get that full federal green light for their chicken.

Legally, it’s meat. And its advocates will point to some huge benefits. They say it’s safer, more sustainable, less need for antibiotics, no e. coli scares, a much smaller environmental footprint.

But we can’t talk about safety without hitting on the biggest piece of misinformation the sources point out. The whole “turbo cancer” claim because the cells are supposedly immortal.

I’m glad you brought that up. That sounds absolutely terrifying. If you’re just scrolling on social media,
it does. So, let’s unpack that phrase, immortal cells. What does that actually mean scientifically?

So, this is a really crucial distinction. To start the process, scientists need cells that can divide over and over again. So they don’t have to keep doing biopsies on animals.

To do that, they use what are called immortalized cell lines. And yes, that functional ability dividing endlessly is something cancer cells also do.

So, that’s the connection people are making. What’s the difference then?

This is the aha moment. The difference is control and environment. Cancer cells divide uncontrollably inside a living body, ignoring all the signals to stop. These cells are dividing outside a body in a sterile, precisely controlled bioreactor to build a specific product. And more importantly, by the time that meat is harvested and cooked, the cells are dead.

Completely dead. And even if by some miracle one survived the cooking process, the sources are definitive: stomach acid would destroy it instantly. You cannot get cancer from eating a cell. Federally, from a science perspective, the safety question is settled.

Okay, here’s where it gets really interesting. Because despite that clear green light from the FDA and the USDA, the political ground is just well, it’s completely shifting. We’re seeing this wild regulatory split across the country.

We’ve gone from a science hurdle to a political one. Right now, you have several states moving to outright ban uncultured meat for human consumption.

And this isn’t a debate about safety anymore.

No, not at all. It’s explicitly about protecting local economies and you could say cultural identity. The stated motivation is to protect local farmers and ranchers. And the sources have some really pointed quotes on this.

Oh, the rhetoric is very high profile. We saw that quote from Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis. He framed his state’s ban as fighting back against, and I’m quoting here, the global elites’ plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish. He made it really clear the focus was on protecting traditional agriculture, specifically to save our beef.

So that language, it really elevates this whole thing. It’s not about cell division anymore. It’s about a culture war. It frames this innovation as a threat to like a way of life.

And when the rhetoric is that charged, the science just doesn’t seem to matter as much to the voters or lawmakers in those states. The focus is on cultural resistance, not safety data, which leads to this immediate and frankly absurd result that the sources highlight.

It’s a logistical and legal nightmare for anyone trying to scale this. It really is the core barrier right now.

Okay, let’s make this concrete for everyone. Give us an example of this logistical nightmare.

All right, think about it from a supply chain perspective. Right now, it is perfectly legal to serve that FDA and USDA approved cultivated chicken in a fancy restaurant in San Francisco.

Okay, it’s passed every federal test. But now imagine a distribution company tries to ship a pallet of that exact same approved chicken across state lines and they try to deliver it to a restaurant in say Miami, Florida. A state where a ban has been enacted, that distributor or the restaurant that serves it could face huge fines or other penalties in Miami.

Even though the product itself is federally legal and recognized as safe, that’s the contradiction. The barrier isn’t a lack of bioreactors. It’s the regulatory risk of just moving your product across an internal market that’s just riddled with these legal holes.

So, how do you plan for anything? Labeling, storage, financing, and distribution network when half your potential market is legally closed off?

You can’t, or not easily. It adds incredible complexity, cost, and legal exposure. This friction alone is a massive anchor holding back commercialization, way more than the science or even the cost. Which leads us right into the market paradox, because you have this intense political fight to ban it. But when you look at the actual numbers, the traditional meat industry isn’t exactly shaking in its boots right now.

Cultivated meat is an infinitesimal player. I mean, we’re talking 0.002% of the global protein market cap. And if you look at actual sales, it’s even smaller.00003%. It’s a rounding error.

So given that, why is so much political capital being spent on these bands? What are they really afraid of? What’s the future they’re looking at?

They’re looking at the global horizon and that’s all about demographics. The demand for protein is not going to stay flat. It’s only going up.

By 2034, the global population is projected to grow by another 600 million people. That pushes the world total past 8.8 billion. And that kind of growth guarantees a massive increase in the demand for food.

Global protein needs are projected to climb from about 351 million metric tons this year to over 406 million by 2034. And traditional methods are already under pressure. Land use, water, climate change.

Exactly. They might struggle to bridge that gap sustainably.

And this brings us to what I think is the most shocking part of this whole deep dive.

The surprising alliances.

Yes. You’d think the world’s biggest meat companies would be funding the opposition, but the sources show they are heavily invested in the very technology their political allies are trying to kill. It’s like the big energy giants, like Chevron, Shell, and BP, who are now pouring money into wind and solar.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. They didn’t just invest. They bought a majority stake in a Spanish cultivated meat company called Biotech Foods.

That’s basically vertical integration for the future.

And Cargill is too. They’re invested in Aleph Farms, which is focused on making complex things like actual beef steaks. They’re trying to integrate this into their massive existing supply chains. But it’s not a guaranteed financial win just yet.

There are still major technical hurdles, right? We saw that with Believer Meats recently.

That’s right. A really high-profile cautionary tale. Believer Meats, an Israeli company backed by Tyson Foods, recently had to file for bankruptcy and they were close to getting full FDA approval.

And their setback really highlights that immense cost challenge. The money isn’t just for building the labs. It’s for optimizing that growth medium, the nutrient broth. That’s the really expensive part.

So the biggest financial hurdle, it’s the sheer operational cost of feeding billions of cells efficiently and at scale.

Precisely. that capital required for massive bioreactor operations is still a huge limiting factor. It just shows there’s still inherent financial risk even with a big name like Tyson backing you.

So in the end, the final decision isn’t with the investors or the state legislators. It comes down to the person holding the fork. What does the consumer actually think about all this?

Well, a 2023 Statista survey on global willingness looks pretty positive actually. 62% of people said they were willing to try cultivated meat, mostly driven by environmental and animal welfare concerns.
But the sources also show this deep cultural fault line, especially in Europe. I mean, how do you even begin to penetrate markets where food is basically sacred?

That is a real challenge. Mintel found that about 45% of French and Spanish participants were seriously concerned about how this would fit into their country’s food traditions. Food history is a powerful thing.
It’s a much harder barrier to overcome than just a high price.

It is, though it’s not a uniform feeling. The UK showed much higher willingness especially among younger people. About 63% there said they’d try it. So you see this generational and cultural split happening. So what does this all mean?

It means cultivated meat is just stuck. It’s caught in this extraordinary political and economic tension. The science is proven. The major global food companies are investing in it because they know we need to scale protein production for the future. But that technological momentum is getting kneecapped completely. It’s getting stopped by state level political fights that are all about protecting the agricultural status quo and by some really powerful cultural rhetoric is forcing companies to spend money on lawyers instead of production.

I think the key takeaway here is just how strange the whole situation is. But the immediate pushback isn’t coming from the market. It’s coming from a political desire to maintain this traditional power structure in agriculture. It’s a battle being fought in state houses, not in labs.

It leads to a pretty interesting final thought that the sources bring up. If the biggest players like JBS and Cargill are betting on this, maybe the biggest disruption won’t be to agriculture, but within it.

What do you mean?

Well, who knows? Maybe someday traditional ranchers will just have a bioreactor facility right there on their ranch.

So, they’d be controlling multiple protein streams themselves.

Why not? So, will cultivated meat be on your grill by next summer? Maybe. But the path to get there is going to be way more about navigating laws and culture than it is about dividing cells.

We want to know what you think. Does the federal safety approval sway you or do the cultural concerns give you pause? Scroll down to the bottom of this post and let us know your thoughts.