It looks like chicken, it smells like chicken and, what do you know, it tastes like chicken.

You would never guess that the piece of meat in front of me did not come from a farm. It was made in a laboratory on an industrial estate just a few miles down the road.

I’m in Huber’s Butchery and Bistro in Singapore, which is the only restaurant in world to have so-called cultivated meat on the menu.

Feedback from customers has been “phenomenal”, according to the restaurant’s owner.

The meat’s creator – California-based Eat Just – says it is ethical, clean and green – with no compromise on taste. Billions of dollars are being poured into the industry, but huge question marks hang over its viability as anything beyond a novelty.

Ever since the first lab-grown burger – which cost a mere $330,000 (£263,400) to create – was unveiled in London in 2013, dozens of companies around the world have joined the race to bring affordable cultivated meat to the market.

So far, only Eat Just has managed to get its product approved for public sale after regulators in Singapore – the only country in the world to allow lab-grown meat to be sold – gave its chicken the green light in December 2020.

But it is still nowhere near being widely available. Cultivated chicken nuggets were briefly on the menu at a private members’ club in 2021.

That partnership lasted a few months and this year Huber’s has started offering a chicken sandwich and a chicken pasta dish to the general public – albeit only once a week with limited dining slots available.

“Cultivated meat is real meat, but you don’t have to slaughter an animal,” says Josh Tetrick, chief executive of Eat Just, who spoke to the BBC from San Francisco. “This way of eating makes sense for the future,” he says.

Unlike plant-based substitutes, cultivated meat is literally meat. The process involves extracting cells from an animal, which are then fed with nutrients such as proteins, sugars and fats.

The cells are allowed to divide and grow, before being placed in a large steel bioreactor, which acts like a fermentation tank.

After four to six weeks, the material is ‘harvested’ from the bioreactor. Some vegetable protein is added, then it is moulded, cooked and 3-D printed to give it the necessary shape and texture.

The resulting strips of deep fried chicken on my plate of orecchiette pasta certainly tasted like the real deal, if a bit processed. Perhaps the sort of chicken you would eat in a fast-food restaurant.

“It’s meat – it’s perfect!” says Caterina, an Italian student who came here especially to try the cultivated chicken. Normally, for sustainability reasons, she would not eat meat but Caterina says she would eat this.

Her only quibble? Serving the chicken with pasta, which typically does not happen in Italy.

Another diner from Singapore says he was surprised by how much it resembled real meat.

“It’s legit”, he says. “I wouldn’t know where it came from. My only concern would be the cost.”

The chicken pasta dish I ordered was S$18.50 ($13.70; £11), but that is vastly discounted relative to the current cost of producing the meat.

Eat Just will not say exactly how much it spends on making its cultivated chicken, but at the moment the company’s production capacity only yields 2kg (4.4lb) or 3kg per week in Singapore.

When you compare that to the 4,000kg – 5,000kg of conventional chicken sold weekly – at Huber’s alone – it gives you a sense of the scale of the task ahead. Put simply, they will need to increase production enormously to avoid making a loss on each piece of chicken.

Eat Just says it has already achieved a 90% reduction in costs since 2018 and the company offered me a tour of its new multi-million dollar production facility in Singapore, which it hopes will open next year.

The pair of shiny steel 1,320 gallon (6,000 litres) bioreactors certainly represent a sign of intent, but in reality they are a tiny fraction of the millions of tonnes of chicken that would need to be produced to match the price of slaughtered chicken.

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Owusu Gideon

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