Lab-grown meat start-up Eat Just, backed by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, looks to scale up and expand after Singapore approval

The American company recently raised US$267 million and received approval to sell more of its cell-grown chicken products
The company will also need to spread across the Asia-Pacific region, particularly China, to continue ramping up manufacturing capacity, according to CEO

Food trends

Dylan Butts

Published: 10:00am, 9 Jan 2022

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Eat Just, an American start-up backed by Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, aims to scale up and expand after receiving approval to sell more of its cell-grown chicken products in Singapore.

While the San Francisco-based company originally produced vegan egg substitutes, its Good Meat division sells chicken breast. Instead of coming from a live animal, the meat is cultivated in a bioreactor from a small cluster of cells.

In December, Singaporean authorities approved the sale of Good Meat’s latest chicken formats, including breasts and strips. The product was unveiled at the end of last year and will arrive in many of Singapore’s hawker food centres in 2022.

“It’s a continued validation that this is not a technology that’s more akin to science fiction, but a technology that’s about feeding people now,” said CEO and founder Josh Tetrick.

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Plant-based ‘chicken’ satay created in Singapore lab

Good Meat raised US$267 million in 2021. The size of the cultured meat market could reach as high as US$25 billion globally by 2030, according to McKinsey & Company.

Other prominent players include Japan’s Integriculture, Hong Kong’s Avant Meats and new competitors such as Israel’s Future Meat, which raised a record US$347 million in its latest investment round.

Good Meat is counting on consumers and regulators to get a taste for the new cell-grown meat trend in countries such as the US, where the company’s latest board member, renowned chef José Andrés, has already committed to serving it in his restaurants.

However, Singapore remains the only country to approve the sale of such products, with Good Meat’s annual production expected to surpass a thousand pounds for the first time in 2022.

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Maggots convert food waste to gold at Singapore insect farm

The city has embraced the technology because of its energy and resource efficiency. The government has pledged to meet 30 per cent of nutritional needs sustainably and locally by 2030.

In comparison, over 90 per cent of Hong Kong food is imported. The city has also faced criticism for sourcing nearly a third of its beef from suppliers in deforested areas of the Amazon.

Eat Just aims to scale up and expand, with plans for a cultured-meat plant in Qatar announced last year. The company will also need to spread across the Asia-Pacific region, particularly China, to continue ramping up manufacturing capacity, according to Tetrick.

“That, more than anything, will allow us to supply everyone with meat, not just a handful of people who are fortunate enough to be able to afford a high end restaurant,” he said.

Good Meat’s dishes are priced at an unprofitable US$17. To bring down production costs and increase output, the company is upgrading from 1,200-litre bioreactors to sizes of 100,000 litres and above. This unprecedented move poses design challenges, but the manufacturing is already under way, according to Tetrick.

Though Good Meat’s goal is for its product to be more affordable, in the future it may resemble meats one would expect to find at a high-end restaurant. That is because cells from rare animals, such as Wagyu beef or wild salmon, can be cultivated at similar costs to chicken.

However, according to Tetrick, “whether it’s beef, pork, Wagyu, Kobe, or bluefin tuna, whether it’s China, the US, Qatar, or Singapore, at the end of the day, we got to make a lot of it.”

Global meat production is forecast to expand by nearly 44 million tons by 2030, according to the OECD-FAO, a collaboration between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. China is expected to remain a key driver of demand.

Assuming this meat comes from livestock, greenhouse gas emissions from the meat sector are projected to rise 5 per cent in the same period.