Singapore Becomes First Country To Approve Lab-Grown Meat

San Francisco start-up Eat Just Inc. received regulatory approval to begin selling its laboratory-grown chicken in Singapore. The Singapore government is the first in the world to allow the sale of cultured meat products.

According to CNN, the “chicken bites” created from cultured chicken cells were approved by the Singapore Food Agency, Eat Just announced on Tuesday.

Initially, the chicken will be sold in a restaurant in Singapore. The availability of the bites will be limited initially and cost more than traditional chicken until production increases. 

“We’ve been eating meat for many hundreds, thousands of years, always needing to kill an animal to eat — until now,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick told CNN Business.

According to The Guardian, the cultured meat is created in a bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. The cells used to create the cultured chicken came from a cell bank, so there is no need to kill a chicken to obtain cells. The cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals to start the process.

Trendy plant-based proteins and meat substitutes, already prominent in the United States, are taking hold in Asia. Last month, Beyond Meat launched plant-based pork in China, while its plant-based beef products hit the shelves in Hong Kong and Singapore supermarkets back in October.