What is Lab-Grown Meat? Eat Just's CEO Explains

Singapore became the first country to permit the sale of cultured meat, allowing Eat Just to sell its lab-grown chicken nuggets. Josh Tetrick, the co-founder and CEO of of the company that also made the popular JUST Egg Folded, says the process is a bit like culturing beer.

“We identify a cell from a chicken, nutrients to feed those cells, so instead of eating soy and corn we identify nutrients for the cells. And then we culture, scale it up in a large steel vessel. And the process is somewhat like culturing beer. At the end of the process, you have chicken meat or beef meat. In our case, it's chicken meat. The simplest way to think about it is it allows all of us to consume meat, the good part, the nutritional composition, the taste and do away with the bad part, which is the killing, the environmental deforestation, the acceleration of zoonotic disease and we can still have a fried chicken.”

Josh says safety is one of the main advantages of cultured meat.

“So if you look at pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, this way of making meat is just significantly cleaner, more sanitary. This way of making meat radically decreases the probability of zoonotic diseases through our food system. If you look at climate change, this way of making meat is 90% more carbon efficient than the typical approach. And if you look at something that maybe is even deeper than that, the morality of how we want to eat food, we don't need to eat food that causes harm. And with this way you don't have to cause harm.”

But the big question is, does it taste the same as regular chicken?

“The most common reaction is this tastes like chicken. It has the flavor profile, it has the texture of chicken. And it's not surprising that it tastes like chicken because it literally is chicken.”

Josh says the price is comparable to premium chicken.

“So 1880, the place that we're fortunate to launch with a chicken dish is somewhere between SGD $23 and $30 ($17 and $23) and we're right in that range. In terms of cost, we are because of the proprietary nature of how we're producing it, we're not sharing costs. I can tell you we're not making money on it right now. But as we continue to scale-up, as economies of scale begin to take hold, we see a pathway in the next 5 or so years to get below the cost of chicken. And that's really where things begin changing.”

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