It’s also entirely possible for chicken to fly off the shelves. Although it only contains 3 percent animal cells, production is likely to be extremely limited. Eat Just, owner of Good Meat, has been in serious financial difficulty for some time and is under great pressure to cut costs and prove it is a profitable business. At very small scales, even a small amount of buyer curiosity can seem like a big success, although it actually tells us very little about the demand for meat cultured with a very small proportion of animal cells.
There is also the question of price. Good Meat’s chicken will sell at S$7.20 ($5.35) for a 120-gram portion of frozen chicken, a considerable premium over similar cuts sold in Singapore supermarkets. We already know that high prices are one of the main things that deter people from buying plant-based meat, so if shoppers aren’t excited about Good Meat’s chicken, some might argue it’s a price issue. , not with the product.
Oddly, none of this really matters. Singapore shoppers are most likely not the real audience for Good Meat’s chicken. In reality, they are the actors who hopefully put on a show for the people who really matter right now: the investors.
After an initial wave of enthusiasm, cultured meat startups have struggled to raise money lately. The industry raised $226 million in 2023, down from $922 million in 2022, and a larger drop than the broader industry-wide drop in venture funding. Eat Just, in particular, is embroiled in a costly legal case with a former supplier and under pressure to come up with new money to keep things going.
Enthusiasm for the industry has also been dampened by laws in Florida and Alabama that ban the sale of cultured meat. Launching in a retail store gives Good Meat a positive story to sell to investors, who will hopefully provide the cash injection the industry needs to continue moving forward.
As with high-end restaurant launches in the US that quickly sold out, we shouldn’t expect each milestone to lead neatly to the next: one retail store, then ten, then 20. The industry is still in a extremely early stage. , and these experiments aim to both capture the attention of investors and stoke consumer expectations.
It could be the case that chicken tenders, mostly plant-based, do not capture the enthusiasm of investors and consumers. Other startups in the space are trying to get around the cost issue by imitating high-end products like sushi-friendly salmon either steak. Others still lean into the weirdness of it all. Australian startup Vow sells culture quail parfait in a restaurant in Singapore. It is still too early to know which of these approaches will succeed or if any of them will succeed.
All this should not be negative for cultured meat. It’s just that it’s too early to know whether the industry is on track to solve the major difficulties in reducing the cost of its manufactured animal cells, and whether cultured meat can surprise consumers in a way that plant-based meat does. Has failed. To get answers to those questions, we will have to wait a long time.