Lab grown meat has been the future of food for fifteen years. It is still the future of food.
The FDA has approved it. The USDA has approved it. Michelin-starred chefs have cooked it. Bezos, DiCaprio, and Cargill have funded it. And right now, in the entire United States, you can eat it at one restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Not because the science doesn’t work. Because almost everything that comes after the science doesn’t work yet.
Bar Crenn, Dominique Crenn’s Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant, was receiving 16 one-ounce portions of cultivated chicken per month at the height of the industry’s most celebrated commercial launch. Two people a night. On a tasting menu with a waitlist. Both Bar Crenn and Good Meat’s Washington DC partner China Chilcano stopped serving cultivated chicken within months. Upside Foods has since shelved plans for a large-scale production facility in Illinois. Investment in cultivated meat hit $989 million in 2021 and fell to $55 million by 2024. Believer Meats and Meatable, two of the best-funded companies in the sector, shut down entirely in late 2025.
The Pattern the Industry Keeps Repeating
Regulatory milestone. High-end restaurant partnership. Enthusiastic press coverage. Then silence. This is what a cultivated meat launch looks like in America. The FDA clears the product, the USDA approves it, a James Beard or Michelin-starred chef agrees to serve it, and then the gap between what the bioreactors can produce and what a functioning restaurant requires becomes impossible to paper over.
Wildtype’s salmon is at Kann, a James Beard award-winning Haitian restaurant in Portland. It is the fourth cultivated product to receive FDA clearance, after two chicken products and a pork fat product from Mission Barns. It is currently the only lab-grown animal protein available for commercial sale in the United States. One restaurant. One city. The rest of the market is a projection.
Price Is Still the Fundamental Problem
Lab grown meat cannot scale until it can price competitively. Mosa Meat, the Dutch company that produced the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a cost of around £1.9 million per kilogram, announced in late 2025 that its costs had fallen 99.999%. The resulting price is still around £52 per kilogram, against conventional beef trading at roughly €7.60 per kilogram in the EU. Analysts at Arthur D Little have suggested that sub-€10 per kilogram is now a realistic near-term target, below which cultivated meat stops being a sustainability story and starts being a category that can genuinely compete. Above it, consumers won’t pay the premium regardless of the environmental argument.
Wildtype has never publicly disclosed its cost per serving. The company’s early production figure was around $200 per serving, against farmed Atlantic salmon retailing at $8 to $12 per pound. The gap between where the product is and where it needs to be for mass retail is substantial, and the investment environment funding the journey to close it has contracted by 94% in three years.
The Cruelty-Free Product That Uses Two Million Fetal Calves
Most cultivated meat production still relies on fetal bovine serum, extracted from the blood of bovine fetuses taken from pregnant cows during slaughter. Around two million calves are used annually to produce roughly 800,000 litres of FBS worldwide. It is one of the more troubling inputs in a product marketed on animal welfare grounds. The cruelty-free pitch depends heavily on which part of the production process you look at.
Some companies have moved away from FBS. Mosa Meat removed it by 2019 and made it a requirement in subsequent funding rounds. Good Meat received approval to use FBS-free media. The broader industry has been slower, partly because FBS is effective, widely available, and cheaper than alternatives. A 2025 Frontiers in Toxicology paper identified major reproducibility, safety, and animal welfare problems with FBS and called for the field to move on. The ethical foundation of the industry is built, in part, on a product that involves the death of millions of unborn animals. That is not a minor footnote.
The Environmental Numbers Under Current Production Methods
Lab grown meat is pitched as dramatically better for the planet. Less land. Less water. Fewer emissions. A 2024 peer-reviewed UC Davis study published in ACS Food Science and Technology found that cultivated meat using pharmaceutical-grade purified growth media, the current industry standard, generates between 246 and 1,508 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram of product. Conventional beef’s median is around 60 kilograms. At the upper end of current production, lab grown meat is more than twenty times worse for the climate than the thing it replaces. The purification process for cell culture media requires fossil fuel inputs three to seventeen times greater than conventional beef production.
The industry argues these figures reflect current methods, not future ones. CE Delft, in a study commissioned by the Good Food Institute, projected 4.0 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram under renewable energy conditions at commercial scale. UC Davis researcher Edward Spang was direct: “Cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea.” The gap between the CE Delft projection and current reality is the gap between a press release and a product.
Four States Have Already Banned It
Florida and Alabama banned lab grown meat in 2024. Nebraska and Mississippi followed. Several other states have introduced similar legislation. The political framing is consistent across all of them: protecting domestic livestock producers from a product funded by tech investors and associated, by politicians who say so with evident relish, with the Great Reset agenda.
The conspiracy theories would be easy to dismiss if they weren’t shaping legislation in major agricultural states. They are. A product that faces outright bans in four states, that many consumers associate with corporate control of the food supply, and that requires explanation before it can be sold is not a straightforward retail proposition regardless of how the unit economics eventually develop.
The religious dimension compounds this. The global halal market was valued at $1.27 trillion in 2021. For cultivated meat to be halal, Islamic scholars have generally ruled that the cell source must come from an animal slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law, and the nutrient bath must contain no forbidden substances. That rules out FBS, which contains blood. Any company using standard cell culture media is producing a product that cannot access the halal market without significant reformulation. Kosher certification raises parallel questions. Together these are not edge cases. They represent a substantial portion of global food consumers.
The Science Was the Easy Part
Cost reduction in the sector is real. The technical progress is genuine. Regulatory frameworks in the US, Singapore, Israel, and the UK are developing. Companies like BlueNalu are advancing approvals across multiple markets, with a commercial partnership with Nomad Foods for European distribution. McKinsey was estimating a $25 billion market by 2030. Investment peaked at $989 million in 2021 and now sits at $82.6 million. The gap between those projections and the capital currently flowing in is the market’s assessment of how much of the unfinished business has actually been finished.
Wildtype’s salmon in Portland is a genuine milestone. It is also, right now, the entire US market for cultivated seafood. As we explored in our piece on the companies using synthetic biology to resurrect extinct flavours, the ambition of what cellular agriculture could produce is genuinely extraordinary. The distance between that ambition and a product available in most cities is where the real story currently sits. And as our piece on microplastics in food found, a salmon grown in a sealed stainless steel tank free from ocean contamination may ultimately be one of the cleaner protein sources available. That case will matter more as the science on microplastics accumulates. Getting there requires solving problems that have nothing to do with growing cells in a bioreactor.
