You’ve seen a chicken nugget before.
Crispy on the outside, juicy in the middle.
Like every chicken nugget should be.
But this is no ordinary chicken nugget.
This is a chicken nugget grown from a single cell, with no animals harmed in the process.
There’s a little bit of irony in the fact that we took such a complex process, right.
Moment of truth!
Creating cultured chicken, and the first product we created was such a simple chicken bite.
And now, in a world-first, it’s available on menus in Singapore after authorities approved
the sale of the cultured meat at the end of 2020.
We have the freedom to sell across Singapore, whether retail, food service, hawker centers, you name it.
Eat Just is the Californian food start-up responsible for bringing the world’s first
lab-grown chicken meat to tables.
Its landmark approval for human consumption may potentially disrupt industrial livestock farms.
But when CEO Josh Tetrick started out in 2011, that notion was a pipe dream.
I had less than $3,000 in my bank account, and the idea was we’re going to start a
food company that takes the animal, the live animal, out of the equation of the food system.
Josh, who started his career working for non-profit organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa, wanted
to fix what he saw as one of the world’s biggest problems: Food sustainability.
And for him, the egg came first.
We decided the place that we’re going to start is figuring out a way to make an egg,
a chicken egg, from a plant.
All I knew at the time is there were 375,000 species of plants all over the world, and
I bet that one of them could scramble like an egg.
Investors liked his vision.
Shortly after he founded the company, billionaire tech investor Vinod Khosla was on board, investing
$500,000 in the idea.
That was at least enough to get me off the couch.
I started hiring food scientists and biochemists and molecular biologists, analytical chemists, chefs.
Years of experimentation later, the team struck on mung bean, a protein-rich legume commonly
used in cuisines across Asia.
And in 2018, Eat Just’s first product, Just Egg, was born.
To date, the company has sold the equivalent of 100 million eggs made from plants
from major retailers, including Walmart, Whole Foods and Alibaba.
But the egg was just the beginning.
What we wanted to do next was real chicken and beef, but not from plants.
Real chicken and real beef that didn’t require killing an animal, that didn’t require using
a single drop of antibiotic; and that’s broadly a process called cellular agriculture.
The process of creating cultured meat starts with a cell.
In this case, from a chicken.
It can be taken either from a live bird through a biopsy, a fresh piece of meat, a cell bank
or the root of a feather.
That cell is then fed nutrients, like those found in soy and corn, before being left to
mature in a large-scale steel vessel.
The process takes around 14 days from start to finish, and the end product is raw, minced meat.
This is manufacturing chicken at scale, without the animal, without the antibiotics,
without all the issues.
And the end product is not plant-based chicken, it’s not some different form, it is literally chicken.
Creating the cell-cultured meat product was the easy part.
Next came the regulatory approvals, which took two years.
Towards the end of 2020, Singapore became the first country to approve Eat Just’s
flagship cultured chicken nuggets for sale nationwide under the Good Meat brand.
The nugget is now available at restaurant 1880, retailing at around $17 for a set meal.
More restaurants in the city-state are expected to come on board in the coming months.
Chef Kaimana, Eat Just’s in-house chef, worked with 1880 to create the novel menu.
We wanted to create two dishes that really spoke to the iconic producers, the largest
producers of chicken in the world, both the United States and China.
How does it compare working with this cell-cultured chicken nugget?
It is exactly the same.
Really?
The same cook time, you can handle it like you would a normal chicken bite.
No magic there, just really typical chicken.
Singapore is home to Eat Just’s Asia Pacific headquarters and its first factory in Asia.
We’re strongly considering making it the global manufacturing headquarters for Good Meat.
While the island, which is slightly smaller than New York City, may seem an unlikely
location for a global meat production facility, Aileen Supriyadi, senior research analyst
at Euromonitor International, says several factors are at play.
Singapore has the 30 by 30 initiative, so the country wants to have 30 percent of the
food to be produced locally.
That’s one of the reasons why they let Eat Just to firstly commercialize in Singapore.
Singapore can also utilize the scientific knowledge, especially the stem cell research.
And Singapore, being the hub in Asia, actually helps those companies export and sell their
products to other countries as well.
The rise of food start-ups comes amid the scrutiny on industrial farming over its unethical
practices and effects on the environment.
The livestock industry, which supports the livelihoods of at least 1.3 billion people
worldwide, has been racing to keep up with the demand for meat.
Every year, an estimated 50 billion chickens are slaughtered for food.
Meanwhile, the wider agriculture industry is responsible for 10-12% of greenhouse gas emissions
a major contributor to climate change.
Not everyone is behind the cultured meat craze, though.
Some are still skeptical of its nutritional value and suitability for human consumption,
while its environmental and social impact remains to be seen. However, Josh claims the process is cleaner
and more ethical than traditional agriculture. Then there are those who just find the concept odd.
It just seems weird and strange, and you can’t quite place what the issue is, right?
Meat comes from killing an animal, right, and doing it in any other way just doesn’t
seem like something we should be messing around with.
I say to them that industrialized animal production is probably the strangest and most bizarre
thing happening, you’re just not aware of it.
And if you did look at it, you’d realize it’s not the way you actually want to eat.
And if there’s a way that we can do it better, let’s get after it.
In fact, demand for alternative meat products, such as cultured or plant-based meat, appears to be growing.
A report estimated that the alternative meat market could be worth $140 billion,
or 10% of the global meat industry, within a decade.
In Asia Pacific, it’s actually quite big.
In 2020 itself, the market size has reached about $800 million.
Companies have started to produce more Asian-based cuisines.
So potentially with lower price, with greater knowledge, consumers will be more interested
to purchase meat alternative products.
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are among the names making waves in the plant-based
meat space, while brands like Memphis Meats are tapping cultured products.
Josh said he welcomes the competition.
I want companies to come in and be a part of solving the problem.
I hope someone hears this interview, watches this interview, and decides I think I can
do it better than this dude who didn’t have any experience of food technology before he started this.
I, of course, have an ego in wanting to be the first that does it.
But there’s too much that needs to be done for only a handful of companies to try and get at it.
However, disrupting the dominance of the established animal agriculture industry won’t happen overnight.
One challenge that may come from cell-based chicken is actually consumers’ perception
about the product being cell-based itself.
The limiting steps to ultimately making this ubiquitous are regulatory approval,
scale and consumer education.
We can’t just focus on one, we’ve got to focus on all three.
Josh says Eat Just has raised over $400 million from investors, including Khosla Ventures,
Founders Fund, Bill Gates’ Gate Ventures and Singapore’s Temasek.
We’ll continue to raise more capital.
At some point, we’ll decide to go public; we want to hit operating profitability first.
This won’t happen without a lot of capital, there’s no getting around it.
As Eat Just sets its sights on getting regulatory approval in other countries, Josh is certain
the bet will pay off.
You have to take leaps of faith every day.
We’re acting as if the U.S. will eventually approve it.
We’re acting as if Europe will eventually approve it.
That, I think, ability for us to invest in today and realize that there’s going to
be an opportunity going forward put us in a place where we could take advantage of the
regulatory approval from Singapore.
And that’s how we’re going to be operating everywhere.