The current pause in production in Singapore comes amid overseas reports of legal and financial woes confronting the US firm.
Eat Just is in a legal dispute with a former partner over alleged unpaid invoices, news outlet Wired reported in early February.
In September 2023, Bloomberg reported that Eat Just is facing a US$100 million (S$134 million) lawsuit from its bioreactor manufacturer and that the firm had dismissed about 40 employees in a cost-cutting move.
Eat Just made international headlines in 2020 when its chicken bites became the world’s first cultivated meat product to receive regulatory approval for sale in Singapore.
Following the approval, Eat Just first sold its cultivated chicken nuggets at a members’ club in Robertson Quay known as 1880 in early 2021. It was then sold on delivery platform foodpanda and at a few hawker stalls on a limited basis.
While a potential alternative to traditionally farmed meat, cultivating meat for consumption is still in its early stages.
According to a 2021 report by management consulting firm McKinsey, the market for cultivated meat could reach US$25 billion by 2030. But the report noted that there are challenges to realising this potential, including getting consumers to trust the product, and making it affordable and on a par with the cost of conventional meat.
The high cost of the culture medium is one obstacle to the scalability of cultivated meat, said William Chen, director of Nanyang Technological University’s food science and technology programme. Culture medium refers to the nutrient broth that the animal cells are immersed in so that they multiply into tissue.
Chen added that it is also costly to invest in the research and development to replace bovine serum – which is conventionally used as a growth supplement – in the medium with kill-free alternatives. Foetal bovine serum comes from the blood of unborn cow foetuses, which makes it ethically controversial and expensive.
Chen also added that producing cultivated meat is highly energy-consuming, and renewable energy sources such as solar energy should be tapped to ensure it is sustainable in the long run.
Despite these challenges, he believes that the industry is in its infancy and still has potential to provide another viable meat alternative.
“These are new technologies. We should give them space to grow. There are bound to be setbacks here and there, but this is not the end of the story,” said Chen.
ST has contacted the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for comment.
Timeline
December 2020: SFA approves the sale of a cultured meat product – bite-size chicken from Eat Just – after it is deemed safe for consumption. It is the first regulatory authority in the world to approve sale of such meat.
January 2021: The cell-based chicken bites are first served in a members’ club in Robertson Quay known as 1880. Subsequently, the novel meat is sold on delivery platform foodpanda and at a few hawker stalls.
March 2022: Eat Just announces that it will build a plant-protein factory in Pioneer. Alternative protein products that would be manufactured include bottled yolk made from mung bean protein and turmeric that can be scrambled and tastes like real eggs.
June 2022: Eat Just breaks ground on its upcoming 30,000 sq ft facility – about half the size of a football field – in food industry hub Bedok Food City. It is expected to be operational by the third quarter of 2023.
December 2022: Eat Just announces that dishes made from its cultivated chicken, such as cultivated chicken kebab and fried cultivated chicken skin salad, will be offered at meat products producer and supplier Huber’s Butchery in Dempsey from January 2023. Eat Just said then it is hoping to get approval from SFA for cultivated beef in 2023.
January 2023: ST reports that Eat Just has received approval from SFA to produce serum-free cultivated meat, a move that would see its laboratory-made chicken produced more cheaply and sustainably.
June 2023: The United States approves the sale of cultured meat from Good Meat and Upside Foods to consumers, making it the second country, after Singapore, to allow cultivated meat sales.
December 2023: Huber’s Bistro in Dempsey pauses its offer of Good Meat chicken. In 2024, it told ST it is expecting to resume the offer “very soon”. THE STRAITS TIMES
