Bill Gates’ artificial meat startup is allowed to sell products in restaurants

Until now every piece of chicken we eat every day comes from real chickens, but this is slowly changing. Two artificial meat startups have convinced US regulators to allow them to start selling lab-grown meat products to the public.

This does not mean that the dish on your table is a non-meat thing. They’re still chicken, except they’re made from a few cells taken from a raw chicken – instead of a chicken part. Lab meat is not yet widely available at the moment, but it will be a big step forward for the future of the meat industry.

These two startups, Good Meat and Upside Foods – a startup invested by billionaire Bill Gates along with other names including Cargill, John Doerr, Richard Branson, SoftBank, … – have been allowed by the US Department of Agriculture to sell meat products. their artificial in the restaurant. The approval comes after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined last year that lab-grown chicken meat was safe for human consumption.

This makes a lot of sense when the ingredients that make up this meat dish are exactly like real chicken. They are simply cells synthesized in a giant tin barrel instead of inside a chicken.

Startup Good Meat has sold artificial fried meat products, cuts, and trimmings in Singapore, the first country to allow the sale of this product. Upside Foods also has a similar product line (artificial chicken nugget) but focuses on the US market and has raised huge investments to do this. Investors have funded about $400 million for the startup in the last year alone.

Currently Upside Foods is in the process of expanding its production capacity. The company says its production facility can currently produce nearly 23 tonnes of meat per year and could eventually expand to more than 180 tonnes per year.

Currently their cost is a significant challenge when it is extremely expensive, but investors are betting that in the future, the cost of artificial meat will come down while the price of natural meat is expensive. go up.

According to Upside Foods, artificial meat can be more productive if the environmental impacts of current agriculture are taken into account. Producing a calorie of energy from natural meat uses 100 times more water than a calorie from barley, the company says.

The high prices and limited supply make it nearly impossible to buy these artificial chicken pieces in the supermarket. Instead, companies will partner with restaurants to deliver their products to diners.

For example, Upside Foods will supply a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Good Meat will partner with a restaurant in Washington DC, currently owned by celebrity chef Jose Andrés. But over the next few years, you’ll probably start to see these artificial meat products popping up in more places. Currently, there are about 150 companies worldwide working to make these artificial cuts of meat more palatable and cheaper to replace meat in your meals.