Meat From a Lab Will Be Cheaper Than Meat From a Farm Within 10 Years

The Question

On August 5, 2013, in a London television studio, food critic Hanni Rützler took a bite of a burger that had never been near a farm. The patty had been grown in a laboratory by Dutch scientist Mark Post from bovine stem cells extracted from a living cow. It tasted, Rützler said, "almost" like meat — the texture was right, but the fat wasn't there. The burger had cost €250,000 to produce and taken two years to grow. The world press was equal parts fascinated and dismissive.

Twelve years later, the dismissal looks premature. In June 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture jointly approved the commercial sale of cultivated chicken — real chicken meat grown from animal cells without slaughter — for the first time in history. UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat (the cultivated meat division of Eat Just) became the first companies to sell the product legally in America; Singapore had beaten them by three years, approving Good Meat's chicken in 2020. The cost of producing cultivated meat has collapsed by more than 99.9% in just over a decade, following a trajectory that mirrors the early history of solar panels and semiconductor chips.

What the Evidence Shows

The industry now comprises dozens of companies pursuing the central challenge: growing animal muscle tissue at industrial scale in large steel bioreactors, cheaply enough to compete with slaughterhouses. The leading players include UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats), Aleph Farms in Israel, Mosa Meat in the Netherlands — the spinout from Mark Post's original research — and Good Meat. Between them they have raised over $3 billion in private investment, with backers including Bill Gates, SoftBank, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tyson Foods, the world's second-largest meat producer.

The cost trajectory is the central data point. In 2013, the price was $330,000 per kilogram. By 2015, Post's team had cut it to around $11 per gram; by 2020, Good Food Institute analysts estimated production at roughly $25 per kilogram. Current estimates from the most advanced producers suggest costs have fallen to between $8 and $15 per kilogram at laboratory scale — already competitive with premium conventional beef in many markets, though not yet at supermarket commodity pricing.

The environmental case is well-documented. A 2021 study in Nature Food found that at scale, cultivated beef requires 99% less land, 96% less water, and produces 78% to 92% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional beef. Global beef farming currently occupies roughly 60% of all agricultural land on Earth; cultivated meat, by contrast, can be scaled in warehouse-sized urban facilities. The geopolitical implications — for water-scarce nations, for tropical countries losing rainforest to cattle ranching, for the global carbon budget — are profound.

Why This Is Happening

Bioreactor technology is scaling rapidly. The primary cost driver is the bioreactor — the large, sterile vessel in which cells multiply in a nutrient-rich growth medium. Early bioreactors were small, expensive, and pharmaceutical-grade. The industry is now engineering food-grade bioreactors at vastly larger scales and lower costs, borrowing techniques from the fermentation industries that make beer, pharmaceuticals, and enzymes. UPSIDE Foods' Emeryville, California facility can produce tens of thousands of pounds of meat annually, and the next generation of facilities will operate at ten to one hundred times that scale.

Growth media costs are collapsing. The second major cost driver is the growth medium — the cocktail of nutrients, growth factors, and amino acids that feeds the cells. Early formulations relied on fetal bovine serum, which is expensive and ethically problematic. Companies have now developed fully animal-free media, and the cost of key growth factors like FGF-2 and transferrin has fallen dramatically as they are produced at scale through precision fermentation. CE Delft analysts estimate media costs could fall a further 80% by 2030.

Regulatory approvals are creating commercial momentum. The US and Singapore approvals of 2023 validated the regulatory pathway for other jurisdictions. The European Food Safety Authority has received applications from multiple producers, and Australia, Canada, Israel, and South Korea are all developing frameworks. Each new approval creates a new market, driving up volumes and driving down costs — a compounding dynamic familiar from every major technology industry.

What Could Happen

What Can We Do

The arrival of affordable cultivated meat is likely but not inevitable. The pace and shape of this transition will be determined by decisions made now — by consumers, policymakers, investors, and the communities whose livelihoods depend on animal agriculture.

Try it — if you can access it. Consumer acceptance is one of the genuine uncertainties in cultivated meat's future. Blind taste tests consistently show cultivated chicken is indistinguishable from conventional chicken, but willingness to try it is a prerequisite for market acceptance. Early adopters where the product is available — Singapore, and parts of the US where Good Meat and UPSIDE Foods are selling — provide the real-world demand signals that investors and policymakers watch.

Engage with agricultural policy honestly. Banning cultivated meat to protect conventional agriculture — as Florida and Alabama have done — does not protect farmers in the long run; it only delays an adaptation coming regardless. Policymakers who care about these communities should invest in transition support for farmers and slaughterhouse workers, not legislative firewalls. Honest, science-based food policy is more useful than either reflexive opposition or uncritical boosterism.

Invest in public research. The Good Food Institute estimates cultivated meat has received about 1% of the public research funding directed at conventional agriculture. Closing that gap — through university programs, public funding, and open-access science — would accelerate cost reductions and ensure the technology's benefits are widely shared rather than captured by a few private companies.

Support worker transition planning now. The global conventional meat industry employs roughly 57 million people. The shift to cultivated meat, if it proceeds as projected, will displace many of those jobs over 15–25 years — enough time to plan, if planning begins now. Unions, governments, and employers should be developing retraining programs, economic diversification strategies, and social safety net provisions today, not in 2035 when the disruption is already underway.