Recent developments in cultivated meat production

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Cell-based or ‘cultivated’ meat has attracted much media interest recently as a proposed solution for food security, provision of safe and affordable protein and as a solution for the unsustainable impact of animal production on the environment.¹

The common terms used for this type of meat production include lab, cultured, in vitro, artificial, synthetic, clean, or most recently, cultivated meat. In this article, I use the term c-meat as it encompasses cultivated, cultured, cell-based and clean meat. C-meat is one aspect of cellular agriculture which involves the production of foods from cells, rather than from whole plants or animals, as well as a small part of the alternative protein landscape for future food.²

The definition of c-meat production is: meat made from stem cells which tries to mimic traditional meat.

Exactly when c-meat will start appearing in supermarkets and restaurants is uncertain, but it’s predicted to be some time within the next ten years. The timing is reliant on the development of cost-effective procedures for scale-up from lab to commercial production and the development of regulation and labelling procedures.