Lab-grown meat to 3D-printed food: inflation, climate, animal welfare shape future menus

By Akito Tanaka, Dylan Loh, Jada Nagumo and Pak Yiu

JULY 22, 2022

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Feeding-Asia/Asia-s-new-food-frontier-The-rise-of-edible-tech

Every Thursday night, at an invitation-only event in an upscale Singapore hotel, a small group enjoys a four-course dinner while watching videos about an unfolding environmental crisis.

Menus in the dimly lit room at the JW Marriott are designed to highlight the environmentally destructive impact of industrial cropping and livestock breeding. 

Corn is served three ways to evoke deforestation, while a dashi broth is poured over colorful vegetables and seaweed to represent rising sea levels.

Then comes the main dish: chicken nuggets, served with maple waffles and a Chinese-style bao bun. Guests put down their wine glasses, slice the meat carefully into bite-sized pieces and linger on the taste.

The ceremony is a sign that the nuggets are far more than standard fast-food fare: No chicken died to make them. They were created from stem cells, made by a U.S. startup and, so far, available only in Singapore. 

Silicon Valley foodtech unicorn Eat Just is selling its meat in the world’s only nation to have approved the commercialization of lab-cultivated chicken. 

The Marriott meal is an early taste of a food technology revolution whose advocates say could feed Asia’s fast-growing population, curb damage to the planet and eventually cost less than traditional meat. 

“We could theoretically grow anything that might come from plants or animals, from cells instead,” Isha Datar, executive director of cellular agriculture research institute New Harvest, said in a talk.

“Vanilla doesn’t have to be rainforest-farmed, egg whites don’t have to come with the yolk, foie gras can be completely cruelty-free, and leather and silk don’t have to come from the back of an animal or the home of a silkworm.”Isha Datar

Food inflation in Asia, where more than 1.1 billion people lacked access to adequate food last year, is hovering near its all-time high and not expected to ease any time soon. 

The region’s population is projected to increase by 700 million in the next three decades. Widening income gaps, supply chain disruptions and extreme climate conditions are causing price surges and accelerating a food security crisis long in the making.

Asia is home to ideas still in early stages of research but potentially transformative in feeding more people, with fewer resources, in the decades to come. Innovations such as lab-grown meat and 3D-printed food are at the forefront of efforts to rethink how, and what, we can feed the region’s next billion.

By 2030 alone, Asia is expected to add 250 million people to its current population of 4.6 billion. 

By then, meat consumption will increase by 18%, but agricultural production will grow only 2% or less, according to a joint report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Around 65% of the world’s middle class will be living in the region by 2030, according to a report by PwC, Temasek and Rabobank. Total spending on food in Asia is expected to double to $8 trillion, the report said, adding that “Asia is unable to feed itself.”

The numbers are opportune for investors with deep pockets and big ambitions. Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investor, has said traditional food solutions can “no longer meet the world’s demands.” It has committed more than $8 billion to foodtech since 2013.

Some of that has been poured into Eat Just, which has also received funding from Mitsui & Co. and Khosla Ventures, as well as private investors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff. 

Valued north of a billion dollars, the company has raised more than $800 million so far. And as food prices have soared, it has received more attention from investors. “In the last three months, I got more phone calls, more emails, more direct messages, more introductions, more interest than I ever had at any time,” Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just, told Nikkei Asia last month.

On a sunny Singapore afternoon last fall, in the trendy heritage neighborhood of Tiong Bahru known for its famed hawker center, Loo Kia Chee received a phone call. It was someone from Eat Just offering a limited-time collaboration with its cultivated meat division GOOD Meat, to serve up their nuggets with his curry.

“I was surprised,” Loo recalls. “I was the first one to get picked for doing this in Asia or the whole world,” and “before that, I didn’t know about the cultivated meat.”

This spring, Loo made history by becoming the world’s first hawker stall to serve lab-made chicken. Customers flocked to Loo’s Hainanese Curry Rice, his popular lunchtime haunt, for the novel treat.

Loo said he thought it tasted “like normal chicken … (and the similarity to conventional chicken is) I think 98%.” 

Asked if he might make the cultivated meat his signature dish some day, Loo seemed receptive to the idea. “If the price challenges [that of conventional meat],” he said, “I will use it.”

Currently producing less than 1,000 kg of cultivated chicken a year, Eat Just is planning a new facility in Singapore that will help scale to tens of thousands of kilograms annually, Tetrick said.

The company expects to achieve cost parity with conventional meat, or become even cheaper, this decade.

Any research funded and developed in Singapore could be scaled to help feed the rest of Asia, where a fast-growing population is coping with rising rates of hunger and malnourishment in the face of surging food prices.

More than 489 million people in Asia were severely food insecure last year, meaning that they had run out of provisions. That is an increase of 112.3 million people in two years in this region alone.

Food prices are expected to keep rising not only in Singapore, but across the region, making self-reliance the latest buzzword.