In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in human history to approve the commercial sale of meat that had never been part of a slaughtered animal — chicken grown from cultured cells in a bioreactor by a San Francisco company, served initially in a single Singapore restaurant

The first commercial meat in the recorded history of human agriculture that had never been part of a slaughtered animal was sold to a group of teenagers at a private members’ club in Singapore on a Saturday night three weeks before Christmas 2020. The technical premise of what Eat Just’s Good Meat brand was doing had been demonstrated in various academic laboratories for approximately a decade before the Singapore approval — the first laboratory-produced beef burger, cooked and eaten by two food critics at a London press conference in August 2013, had been produced by the Dutch food scientist Mark Post at Maastricht University at an approximate production cost of $280,000 per patty, funded substantially by Sergey Brin of Google as a proof-of-concept demonstration rather than as a commercial venture. The intervening seven years of accumulated scientific work by approximately 60 competing cultivated-meat startups across the United States, Israel, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Japan had reduced the per-unit production cost by approximately three to four orders of magnitude and had progressively refined the specific cell-culture protocols, growth-medium formulations, and bioreactor engineering that made commercial-scale production plausible. The specific regulatory gate that had remained closed across the entire seven-year period was that no national food-safety regulator anywhere on the planet had approved the resulting product for commercial human consumption.

The Singapore approval was, by every account of the subsequent food-technology industry coverage, substantially not accidental. According to CNBC’s contemporary December 2020 coverage of the Singapore Food Agency’s approval of Eat Just’s cultivated chicken product, the SFA had spent approximately two years working with Eat Just on the specific safety-review protocols under which the cultured chicken product would be evaluated — during a period when Eat Just was simultaneously pursuing regulatory approval in the United States (where the joint US Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration approval process would eventually take until June 2023 to complete), the European Union (which had not, as of the current 2026 date, approved any cultured meat product for commercial sale), and several other jurisdictions. The specific factor that made Singapore the first-mover jurisdiction was, per Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s contemporary remarks, the SFA’s “forward-thinking and rigorous” regulatory approach — a specific institutional posture in which the SFA had deliberately structured its Requirements for the Safety Assessment of Novel Foods framework (published in November 2019) to allow substantial procedural flexibility on new-technology product categories while maintaining what the Good Food Institute’s Elizabeth Derbes subsequently described as “carefully calibrated safety standards” appropriate to genuinely novel food products.

What the SFA actually approved

The specific approval issued on 2 December 2020 was, in the detailed regulatory language of the SFA’s public announcement, permission for Eat Just to sell “cultured chicken as an ingredient in chicken bites” — meaning that the approved product was not a whole-muscle chicken cut but a formulated food product in which approximately 70 percent of the mass was chicken cells grown in Eat Just’s bioreactors and approximately 30 percent was mung bean protein and other plant-based ingredients. As detailed in Green Queen’s December 2020 coverage of the first commercial sale of Eat Just’s cultured chicken bites to restaurant 1880, the SFA’s approval documentation confirmed that Eat Just had successfully demonstrated 20 consecutive production runs at commercial scale in 1,200-litre bioreactors, that the resulting product contained no antibiotics (unlike conventional industrial poultry production, in which antibiotics are routinely administered), and that the final chicken cells exhibited what the SFA described as “extremely low and significantly cleaner microbiological content” than conventional chicken meat produced by traditional slaughter methods. The specific cell line used in the initial approved product had been developed using a small amount of animal-derived bovine serum in the culture medium — a technical fact that Eat Just subsequently addressed by developing an animal-free nutrient recipe that it committed to bringing to commercialisation pending additional regulatory review.

The initial commercial launch on 19 December 2020 was, in terms of physical scale, extremely small. The 1880 restaurant served the cultured chicken bites in three distinct dishes — a Chinese-inspired bao bun with crispy sesame, an American-inspired crispy maple waffle with hot sauce, and a Brazilian-inspired phyllo puff pastry with black bean puree — representing the three largest poultry-producing countries in the world. The first diners, in a substantially deliberate marketing choice by Eat Just and 1880, were Singaporean teenagers aged 14 to 18, on the specific theory that the generation whose entire adult lives would be lived in a food economy substantially reshaped by cultivated meat should be among the first to encounter the product. The total number of servings the restaurant produced across its first several months of cultivated chicken sales remained substantially small — measured in dozens rather than thousands of individual portions per week.

The five years since

The trajectory of the broader cultivated meat industry across the five and a half years between the Singapore approval and the current date has been, by essentially every measure of contemporary food-technology industry coverage, substantially more difficult than the 2020 announcements had suggested. Per Just Food’s 2025 retrospective on the countries that have approved cultivated meat and the current state of the industry, the United States Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture jointly approved cultivated chicken from Eat Just’s Good Meat division and the California-based competitor Upside Foods in June 2023 — approximately two and a half years after the Singapore approval. Israel approved cultivated meat in January 2024. The Netherlands has established substantial state-supported cellular-agriculture research infrastructure but has not yet issued a commercial approval. The European Union has not approved any cultured meat product for commercial sale. Several US states — including Florida (May 2024), Alabama, and Mississippi — have passed state-level bans on cultivated meat sales despite the federal FDA/USDA approval. The Singapore restaurant 1880 that served the world’s first commercial cultivated meat in December 2020 continued serving the product for approximately three and a half years, with Eat Just’s Good Meat expanding to sales at Singapore’s Huber’s Butchery in 2023, before Good Meat paused its Singapore retail sales in March 2024 citing production-scaling challenges.

As detailed in the International Bar Association’s analysis of the regulatory frameworks that Singapore and the United States established for cultivated meat, the fundamental commercial challenge facing the cultivated meat industry across the past three years has been that the per-kilogram production cost of cultured meat has not fallen fast enough to compete with the substantially cheaper conventional meat products the industry was designed to displace. Multiple prominent cultivated-meat companies — including Believer Meats, Aleph Farms, and several others — have either scaled back operations, laid off substantial fractions of their workforce, or ceased operations entirely across 2023-2025. The Singaporean commercial launch that opened the current era of cultivated meat commerce on 19 December 2020 was, in essential respects, substantially further ahead of the underlying commercial viability of the specific business it was launching than the initial contemporary press coverage suggested. Whether the industry the Singapore Food Agency’s 2 December 2020 approval formally created will eventually produce the substantial displacement of conventional meat production that its founding entrepreneurs originally predicted — with the accompanying environmental benefits (reduced land use, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced water consumption, elimination of industrial animal slaughter) that had substantially motivated the initial investment — remains, five and a half years into the era the Singapore approval opened, substantially uncertain.