Cell-based meat is real animal meat grown from cells in a controlled facility instead of raised and slaughtered on a farm. A small sample of cells is taken from a living animal, placed in a nutrient-rich liquid, and multiplied inside large steel tanks called bioreactors until there’s enough tissue to form a meat product. The result is biologically identical to conventional meat at the cellular level, but produced without raising or killing animals.
How Cells Become Meat
The production process has four main phases. First, a tiny tissue sample is taken from a living animal, often through a painless biopsy. From that sample, specific stem cells are isolated. The most important are muscle satellite cells, which naturally sit beneath the surface of muscle fibers and can mature into the same muscle tissue found in a steak or chicken breast. A second type, mesenchymal stem cells, can develop into fat cells, connective tissue, and cartilage. Together, these cell types recreate the composition of conventional meat, which is roughly 90% muscle fiber and 10% fat and connective tissue.
Once isolated, the cells enter a growth phase. They’re placed in large bioreactors filled with a warm, nutrient-rich liquid called growth media. This liquid acts as a substitute for the blood supply an animal’s body would normally provide, delivering proteins, sugars, vitamins, and minerals that fuel cell division. The cells multiply rapidly, doubling their population over and over until there are billions of them.
In the third phase, the cells are triggered to mature. Muscle cells fuse together into fibers, and fat cells begin storing lipids, mimicking what happens naturally inside an animal’s body. To give the final product structure and texture, many producers use scaffolds: three-dimensional frameworks that cells can attach to and grow around. These scaffolds are made from materials like collagen, soy protein, cellulose, alginate (derived from seaweed), and even decellularized plant tissues such as spinach leaves or apple slices, whose natural porous structures provide a ready-made architecture for cell attachment. The fourth and final phase is harvesting the tissue and processing it into a food product, whether that’s ground meat, nuggets, or something more structured.
What Feeds the Cells
Early cell-based meat research relied on fetal bovine serum, a costly liquid derived from unborn calves, to nourish growing cells. This was a major ethical and economic problem. The industry has since shifted toward serum-free alternatives. Companies now use combinations of growth-promoting proteins like insulin and transferrin, along with plant-based ingredients such as soy, wheat, rice, and yeast hydrolysates. Some researchers have even developed nutrient extracts from microalgae and agricultural byproducts like fermented soybean meal and rapeseed protein. One widely cited open-source formula, called Beefy-9, replaces serum with a lab-made version of albumin (a common blood protein) and reduces the concentration of expensive growth factors. Lowering the cost of this growth media remains one of the biggest challenges in making cell-based meat affordable.
Where It’s Legal to Buy
Singapore became the first country to approve the commercial sale of cell-based meat. In December 2020, a company called Eat Just sold its cultivated chicken bites to a restaurant in Singapore’s Robertson Quay neighborhood, marking the world’s first commercial sale of lab-grown meat to consumers.
In the United States, the FDA completed its first pre-market safety review of a cell-cultured food product in November 2022. That review was not a formal “approval” but rather a confirmation that the agency had no further safety questions about the company’s product. Before reaching consumers, producers also need inspection clearance from the USDA, which oversees the manufacturing and labeling side. The two agencies share regulatory authority: the FDA handles the cell cultivation process, while the USDA governs everything from harvest through packaging and sale.
The Environmental Picture Is Complicated
One of the most common claims about cell-based meat is that it will be far better for the environment than conventional livestock farming. The reality is more nuanced and depends heavily on how the production facility is powered. A comprehensive life cycle assessment found that greenhouse gas emissions from cultured meat could range from about 80% less than conventional beef to more than 25 times greater, depending on the production scenario. The biggest variable is energy. Scenarios that used highly purified, pharmaceutical-grade ingredients (which require energy-intensive manufacturing) produced 4 to 25 times more carbon emissions per kilogram than the median for retail beef. Scenarios using food-grade inputs and cleaner energy sources performed much better. In short, cell-based meat has the potential for a smaller environmental footprint, but only if the industry solves its energy and ingredient efficiency problems.
Nutrition and Taste
Because cell-based meat is built from the same cell types found in conventional meat, its baseline protein content is comparable. Producers can also control the ratio of muscle to fat cells, which opens the door to customizing nutritional profiles in ways traditional farming cannot. You could, in theory, produce a burger with a specific balance of saturated and unsaturated fats.
That said, some nutritional gaps remain. Conventional meat from ruminant animals like cattle contains certain fatty acids, including conjugated linoleic acid, that are produced through the unique digestive chemistry of those animals. These compounds may be absent in cultured versions unless they’re added separately. Early taste tests have also noted that cultured meat products can taste dry due to insufficient fat content, though this is an engineering challenge that companies are actively working to solve through better co-culture techniques that grow muscle and fat cells together.
Antibiotics and Food Safety
Antibiotic resistance is one of the most serious public health threats tied to conventional meat production. Antibiotics are widely used in livestock farming as growth promoters and as a cheap substitute for better sanitation practices. Cell-based meat sidesteps this problem almost entirely. Antibiotic use during the production process is extremely low, and most producers aim to eliminate it altogether. Because the meat is grown in a sterile, enclosed environment, it’s also inherently protected from the contamination risks that come with slaughterhouses. Theoretically, the final product could be free of drug residues, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and common foodborne pathogens like salmonella or E. coli.
Cost and Scaling Challenges
The economics of cell-based meat have improved dramatically but remain a major barrier. In 2013, the first lab-grown hamburger patty cost about $325,000 to produce. A recent techno-economic analysis estimated that a large-scale production facility could bring the cost down to roughly $63 per kilogram of cultured meat. That’s a massive drop, but still far above conventional meat prices: wholesale lean beef was around $6 per kilogram and lean pork about $4 per kilogram in 2021.
At $63 per kilogram, cell-based meat could potentially find a market as a premium niche product in wealthy economies. But reaching true price parity with conventional meat will require breakthroughs on multiple fronts: cheaper growth media, lower capital costs for building production facilities, reduced labor expenses, and greater efficiency in the bioreactors themselves. The growth media alone can account for the majority of production costs, which is why the race to develop affordable, food-grade, serum-free formulas is so central to the industry’s future.