World’s first cultivated meat butchery debuts cell-based cuts from Good Meat

09 Dec 2022 --- This week, consumers are having a taste of the world’s first cultured cuts at a Singaporean butchery’s revamped bistro menu. With its grassroots in Southeast Asia’s “Garden City,” the cell-based movement has evolved beyond its germination stage and is now accelerating past initial proof of concept.

The technology is now widely considered as the food industry’s stronghand in addressing global protein shortages and the climate impacts of conventional farming.

Good Meat, the cultivated meat division of food technology company Eat Just, has teamed up with family-owned Huber’s Butchery, a Singapore-based producer and suppliers of meat products, to become the first butchery in the world to sell and serve cultivated meat.

“For our sneak preview dining experiences this week, the meal is a set menu including cultivated chicken kebab with couscous; fried cultivated chicken skin with Greek salad; and Provencal cultivated chicken stew,” Andrew Noyes, VP and head of global communications and public affairs at Eat Just, tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

Huber’s butchery is the world’s first cell-based meat butchery, based in Singapore (Credit: GoodMeat).What’s next for cell-based dining?
The Good Meat and Huber’s teams are still working on what dishes will be offered when weekly reservations open for the general public in January.

“When we founded our butcher shop, we made it our mission to provide top quality and exceptional tasting meat products with the highest food safety standards at an affordable price. Partnering with Good Meat is in keeping with that vision and the realities of our ever-changing food system,” says Huber’s Butchery managing director Ryan Huber.

“Cultivated meat could be one of the solutions to over-farming due to increased population size and density and an increase in animal protein consumption in many parts of the world,” adds executive director Andre Huber.

Good Meat’s current production capacity is limited and demand has “far outstripped” supply, details Noyes. “In June, we broke ground on the largest cultivated meat production center in Asia,” he states.

“The facility at JTC Bedok Food City will have the capacity to produce tens of thousands of pounds of meat from cells, without the need to slaughter a single animal.”

Enter the next big food revolution
The special preview coincides with the second anniversary of GOOD Meat’s historic commercial greenlight in Singapore and follows last month’s United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Egypt where the company’s chicken was sampled by global leaders, media and members of civil society for the first time outside of Singapore.

Since launch, the company’s chicken has been featured on menus at local fine dining establishments, roadside hawker stalls and via Foodpanda, a food and grocery delivery platform in Asia.

This week, Huber’s Butchery is serving a range of cultivated chicken dishes for intrepid diners (Credit: Good Meat).“To date, our cultivated chicken has been served in a variety of ways in a range of venues,” details Noyes.

“Through our partnership with the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s renowned Cantonese restaurant Madame Fan, we offered Asian-inspired chicken salad with sesame mirin vinaigrette, steamed chicken dumplings and chicken vegetable stir-fry.”

“At Loo’s Hainanese Curry Rice, a famous hawker stall in Singapore’s Tiong Bahru district, customers enjoyed a cultivated chicken curry rice dish made with the same recipe the proprietors have been using for 76 years,” they highlight.

“Our in-house chefs are always eager to collaborate with local chefs and foodies and explore new, culturally relevant and delicious ways to prepare our chicken,” they explain.

Envisioning a cell-based supermarket aisle
The genesis of the cell-based protein renaissance is met with the question of what will be left of conventional agriculture in the coming decades once the movement fully takes off. 

But while cultured meat is anticipated to play a pivotal role in the transformation of the global food system, it is notable that industry cannot harness this opportunity effectively without the help of farmers.

“One good example of the burgeoning cultivated meat industry working with conventional ranchers is our partnership with the Toriyama farm in Japan,” highlights Noyes. 

“They make the world’s most desired Wagyu beef and we have a partnership with them whereby we plan to develop cultivated Wagyu beef from their cows’ cells. That project is currently in the R&D phase.”

With Singapore being a multicultural food hub, previous analysis has supported that the halal status of cultured meat could potentially be resolved by identifying the source cell and culture medium used in culturing the meat.

The Good Meat and Huber’s teams are still working on what dishes will be offered when weekly reservations open for the general public in January (Credit: Good Meat).Researchers have previously concluded that halal cultured meat can be obtained if the stem cell is extracted from a halal-slaughtered animal, and no blood or serum is used in the process.

“We’re currently exploring the possibility of halal certification and will work closely with the religious authorities given that slaughter-free, cultivated meat is very novel,” shares Noyes.

“In the future, once we’'ve been able to scale up substantially and we’'re ready to enter the retail space, I envision our cultivated chicken stocked alongside conventionally raised and slaughtered poultry and plant-based proteins in supermarket meat cases.”

“Shoppers will be able to choose the option that is right for them, and their family and we believe that a good number of consumers will select cultivated meat,” he concludes.

By Benjamin Ferrer