Lab-grown meat, in its most common commercial forms today, looks like boneless chicken breast, nuggets, or ground meat rather than a marbled ribeye steak. The visual resemblance to conventional meat depends heavily on the product format: simple ground or minced products can already pass for the real thing, while whole cuts like steaks are still catching up in terms of realistic fat marbling and muscle grain. Here’s what you’d actually see if you put cultured meat next to its conventional counterpart.
Ground and Processed Formats
Most cultured meat products that have reached consumers so far are processed formats: chicken filets, nuggets, and satay-style pieces. UPSIDE Foods, one of the first companies to sell cultured meat in the U.S., describes its debut product as “Formed Cell-cultivated Chicken,” made from over 99% cultivated chicken cells with less than 1% binding ingredients (the same type used in conventional meatballs). Visually, it looks like a boneless chicken filet or the inside of a chicken sandwich.
GOOD Meat, another early entrant, has offered two visually distinct versions of its cultivated chicken. In taste tests, its first-generation product was described as resembling the inside of a McDonald’s McNugget: a smooth, homogenous mass with no visible texture variation. Its second-generation product looked noticeably different, with long, fibrous strands that approximated roasted chicken thigh. Reviewers noted it appeared to have been grown in flat sheets, then folded and threaded onto skewers to mimic whole-muscle chunks. The difference between those two products shows how quickly the visual quality is evolving.
Color: Pink, Red, or Pale?
Raw cultured meat cells grown in a lab start out pale, almost beige or off-white, because they lack the pigment proteins that give conventional beef its red color. The red in a raw steak comes primarily from myoglobin, a protein that stores oxygen in muscle tissue. Without intervention, cultured beef wouldn’t look much like beef at all.
To fix this, researchers add myoglobin or hemoglobin directly to the cell culture during growth. When bovine muscle cells are cultured with these heme proteins, they absorb the pigment and develop a color closer to what you’d expect from raw beef. Cooking these treated cells produces a brown color similar to cooked conventional beef. Some researchers have gone further, genetically engineering muscle cells to produce carotenoids (the pigments found in carrots and tomatoes), which tint the meat without adding external ingredients. Cultured chicken, by contrast, has less of a color gap to close since conventional chicken is already pale.
Cultured Salmon Looks Different Up Close
Cultured seafood presents its own visual challenges. In a side-by-side comparison on Science Friday, a chef and tasters examined Wild Type’s lab-grown salmon next to conventional salmon. The cultivated version was strikingly bright orange, so vivid that one taster compared it to a clownfish. It had white fat strips running through it similar to regular salmon, which helped it look familiar on the plate.
The differences became obvious when handled. Conventional salmon flakes apart in rigid, clean layers when you cut into it. The cultivated version broke apart differently, more like tofu than fish, because its internal fiber structure wasn’t organized the same way. It also didn’t respond to heat the way a normal piece of fish does. So while it passed the visual test on a plate, anyone who works with salmon regularly could spot the difference by texture and how it moved under a knife.
Why Whole-Cut Steaks Are Harder to Replicate
A chicken nugget is forgiving. A ribeye steak is not. The visual complexity of a conventional steak comes from its hierarchical structure: parallel muscle fibers bundled together, white streaks of intramuscular fat (marbling), and connective tissue all arranged in specific patterns. Recreating that layered look is the central challenge of cultured meat.
Muscle fibers in a living animal grow in regularly aligned patterns, and that alignment is what gives meat its visible grain. When you grow cells in a simple gel or liquid, they clump randomly, producing something that looks uniform and textureless. To create visible fiber direction, researchers use scaffolds: structural frameworks that guide cells to grow in organized lines. Fiber-based scaffolds are especially good at inducing strong alignment across an entire piece, while porous scaffolds and plain hydrogels tend to produce less directional, more random-looking tissue.
Some of the most creative scaffold work uses decellularized plant tissues. Celery, parsley stems, green onion bulbs, and spinach leaves all have natural vascular channels that run in one direction. When stripped of their plant cells and seeded with animal muscle cells, these structures guide the growing meat into aligned fibers that visually mimic the grain of conventional muscle. The plant scaffolding essentially acts as invisible architecture for the final product.
How Fat Marbling Is Engineered
Marbling, the white flecks and streaks of fat distributed through a cut of beef, is one of the hardest visual features to recreate. Fat and muscle cells need very different growing conditions: different nutrients, different scaffold stiffness, different chemical signals. Growing them together in one culture is extremely difficult.
The workaround is to grow fat and muscle separately, then combine them. Researchers at several institutions have grown bovine fat tissue in alginate (a seaweed-derived gel), extracted the mature fat cells, and embedded them within engineered muscle tissue using 3D printing. The result is a marble-like construct where fat is distributed within and between muscle layers, mimicking the intramuscular fat pattern of a conventional steak. A team published in Nature Communications demonstrated this approach by 3D-printing muscle, fat, and even blood vessel cells into a steak-like structure using separate print heads for each tissue type, assembling them in ratios that match real beef.
These printed steaks aren’t commercially available yet, but they represent what the next generation of cultured meat will look like: layered constructs with visible fat marbling, directional muscle grain, and a cross-section that reads as “steak” rather than “paste.”
What Happens When You Cook It
Cultured meat does brown when cooked. The Maillard reaction, the chemical process that creates a golden-brown crust on seared meat, depends on amino acids and sugars reacting at high heat. Cultured meat contains both, so it can develop surface browning and seared color similar to conventional meat. Products treated with myoglobin during growth also transition from pink to brown when heated, mimicking the familiar color change of cooking a burger or steak.
The visual differences during cooking tend to show up in how the meat moves and holds together rather than in color. Cultured products with less structural organization may shrink differently, release less fat, or lack the way a conventional cut “seizes” and firms up predictably on a grill. As fiber alignment and fat integration improve, these cooking behaviors are expected to become more realistic.
How It’s Labeled on the Package
In the U.S., the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service must pre-approve all labeling for cell-cultured meat and poultry before it reaches consumers. The FDA and USDA share oversight: the FDA regulates the cell collection and growth phase, while the USDA handles processing, packaging, and labeling. Products must be “truthfully labeled,” meaning the packaging has to clearly indicate the product is cell-cultivated rather than conventionally raised. UPSIDE Foods’ label, for instance, reads “Formed Cell-cultivated Chicken.” The USDA is still developing formal labeling regulations specific to these products, so exact terminology may evolve, but the requirement for clear, non-misleading identification is already in place.