Lab-grown meat: moral mission meets market realities

When lab-grown meat first captured investors’ attention, the promise was simple: steak without cattle, chicken without poultry — a carnivorous diet stripped of its moral baggage.

A decade later, the first “cultivated food” is arriving, but somewhere less obvious: in dog bowls, sushi counters, chocolate bars and, if one London start-up has its way, sausages.

The promise of a rapid shift from farms to factories has receded. The new pitch is more focused: cultured cells will work first in corners of the food system where the price is easier to bear or the advantages are simpler to explain.

“The technology is there but it’s technology to make better sausages, not brand new premium steaks,” said Max Jamilly, co-founder and chief executive of Hoxton Farms, a London-based company growing cultivated pork fat.

Cultivated food starts with a small sample of animal or plant cells. These are fed nutrients and grown in the controlled environment of a bioreactor — a process that, if made cheap and reliable, could break food’s link with animals, farmland and fisheries.

But the sector has been held back by high costs, slow regulation, consumer scepticism and the difficulty of scaling laboratory processes into industrial production.

Those problems have become harder to ignore as funding has dried up.

In 2021, at the height of the climate-tech boom, alternative protein companies raised more than $5bn, according to the Good Food Institute, as start-ups including Upside Foods, Eat Just, Believer Meats and Mosa Meat promised to move lab-grown chicken and beef to industrial production.

The sector raised $881mn last year, with cultivated meat and seafood companies attracting just $74mn, and start-ups are now seeking to break into early markets before they can deliver on transformative visions.

Jim Mellon, a British entrepreneur and investor who has backed a string of cultivated and fermentation businesses through vehicles including Agronomics, believes some first-wave companies misunderstood the kind of business they were building.

Moonshot capitalism

This is part of a series on the billions of dollars pouring into start-ups pursuing scientific and engineering breakthroughs that could transform the way we live.

Part 1. How AI is reviving the kind of long-shot sci-fi bets that helped build Silicon Valley

Part 2. Bionics and neurotech: the businesses looking to meld bodies or brains with machines

Part 3. Quantum computing: as a new computer era dawns, the race is on to find a path to profit

Part 4. Lab-grown food: the sector is moving beyond lofty early promises to find niches where it can address a need

Some US start-ups, he said, “thought that they were in Silicon Valley”, meriting “very high salaries” and “Google or Meta-type atmospheres”. But cultivated food was “an industrial process” where margins “won’t be 50 per cent”.

Mellon’s critique reflects a wider reassessment among founders and investors: the sector needs factories, regulatory approvals, buyers and sufficiently low manufacturing costs to compete with traditionally produced food.

Meatly, an Agronomics-backed company whose cultivated chicken is derived from “a single sample of cells from one egg, one time”, is trying to prove the model in pet food. It tested the waters last year with a limited run of dog treats produced with plant-based pet food brand The Pack and retailer Pets at Home, another investor.

“We felt the important thing was to have a product in the market to just start communicating with consumers,” said Owen Ensor, chief executive.

The start-up, which has raised £10.4mn to build what it says will be Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility, believes pet food offers both scale and a better initial market. The global market is worth about £120bn and manufacturers rely on the sometimes volatile human food supply chain for meat byproducts.

But steep engineering challenges remain. Cultivated meat companies still have to show that cells can grow reliably in large tanks, without contamination and at volumes that justify the cost of facilities. Ensor says animal cells are fragile: they do not have cell walls and can be damaged by pressure, bubbles or by mixing. Any bacteria or yeast that enter the tank can quickly outgrow them. “The key is to prove it works at scale,” he said.

Hoxton Farms is pursuing a different path: cultivated fat sold to processed meat manufacturers as an ingredient. Jamilly said fat was central to meat’s taste and texture, but was often treated as an afterthought.

“When you eat a sausage, it might be that the lean meat came from one country and the fat came from a completely different country,” he said. Fat supply can therefore be volatile, while a relatively small amount of cultivated fat could improve a much larger product.

In the early days of the lab-grown meat sector, he said, “there was a big focus on vegans and vegetarians, which I always thought made little sense. Firstly, because from a climate perspective, they’re a solved problem. Secondly, because they’re a pretty small market.”

Hoxton has raised about $35mn and is seeking approval first in Asia. It submitted a regulatory dossier for cultivated pork fat in Singapore in late 2025 and has a partnership with Sumitomo Corporation in Japan. Jamilly expects Hoxton’s first approval to come next year in east Asia, followed by the US.

Seafood offers another opportunity. San Francisco start-up Wildtype has started selling cell-based salmon after completing a regulatory consultation with the US Food and Drug Administration and says it is one of only a few cultivated food businesses shipping product every week.

The company’s pitch is not only climate or animal welfare but purity: salmon without parasites, mercury, microplastics or antibiotics. “Nobody wants pollution in their food,” said co-founder Justin Kolbeck.

Wildtype chose sushi-grade salmon partly because premium fish can bear a higher price than commodity meat. But Aryé Elfenbein, its other co-founder, said the format also mattered because presenting cultivated salmon in a recognisable, attractive form “enabled us to really start the conversation from the place of food rather than science”.

The same logic is emerging beyond meat and fish. Celleste Bio, an Israeli start-up backed by Mondelez, has produced chocolate bars using cell-cultured cocoa butter at Cadbury’s Bournville factory in Birmingham. Its pitch is not that consumers are clamouring for lab-grown chocolate, but that confectionery companies need more reliable supplies after years of cocoa price volatility.

Starting with one or two cocoa beans, Celleste takes cells from the plant and grows them in tanks. Michal Beressi Golomb, its chief executive, describes the process as creating a “new cocoa tree for cocoa cells”. The company says its cocoa butter has an identical chemical profile to the conventional product and can be used as a “drop-in replacement” in chocolate manufacturing.

Celleste is aiming for US and Israeli regulatory approvals by the end of 2027 and wants annual production of cocoa butter to hit 50,000 tonnes by 2035 — still a small share of a market it estimates at about 2mn tonnes.

The risks in the sector remain substantial. Many consumers remain wary of “lab-grown” food, a term the industry dislikes but cannot escape. Jamilly says he prefers “cultivated”, arguing that “lab-grown sounds a bit icky”.

Regulation is still slow, particularly in Europe, and some US states have moved to restrict or ban cultivated meat.

No company has yet proved that cultivated food can move from carefully managed launches and pilot facilities to mass production at prices mainstream food companies will pay.

Mellon argued that if factories were built and costs driven down, the sector could help address food insecurity, price volatility and the environmental damage of intensive farming. But he said the industry would only succeed if it could become a business rather than a moral cause.

“If we don’t have the capitalist motive to make this work, then it’s not going to work,” he says.