Cultivated Meat in Singapore: The Road to Commercialization

Cultivated Meat Production

The fundamental concepts of cultivated meat production were built on tissue engineering. This technology is not a novel one, and it is used widely on medical implementations, to name a few, on regenerative medicine, drug development and toxicology research [4]. First, stem cells are harvested from embryos or muscle tissues of the host animal before expanding and differentiating them into muscle cells [4, 5]. Small scale clean meat production can be conducted in a culture plate or flask supplied with growth medium under controlled conditions in an incubator [5, 6]. Large scale cultured meat production involves one additional step, which is the incubation of muscle cells in a bioreactor where the cells multiply and eventually they are transferred to a scaffold or matrix to further grow into larger tissue and muscle fibers.

Current Cultivated Products in Singapore and Their Potentials

There are several start-ups in Singapore that had started to sell their products to restaurants and via food delivery platforms, such as Umami Meats, Gaia Foods, Shiok Meats and Sing Cell (Table 1). Some of the major clean meat produced are pork, crab, fish, lobster, shrimp, dairy products and chicken.

Eat Just is a California start-up that (first in the world) received the green light to sell lab- grown meat in Singapore under their brand Good Meat. The first Singapore restaurant to offer a venue for the sale of this product was 1880. Not long after, Eat Just gained extra approvals for various in vitro chicken products, namely tenders, chicken breast and shredded chicken. This start-up had not only served 700 Singaporean to date but also had spent over $267 million of capital increment on systems and vessels building that will scale up production in both Singapore and the United States. With investors pouring in over $2 billion between 2020 and 2022, Eat Just aimed to attain approval from the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration in the United States as early as end of 2023.

Ants Innovate has 18 years of precision tissue engineering experience before stepping into the cultured meat industry.

The generation of GMO-free pig muscle cells has been their focus since 2017 [7]. They patented novel scaffold technology for cell culture later that year before attaining A*STAR patents and creating their first meat snack prototype from slice pork cuts. Currently, they are focusing on filing intellectual property protection for tissue building block technology [7]. ProCYTE is a cultivated meat product from Cellivate Technologies. During the 2020 Asia-Pacific Agri- Food Innovation Summit, its founder and CEO, Dr Viknish Krishnan-Kutty made a speech about their confidence in making these cells accelerate in growth multiple times and at the same time minimizing the media usage and overall cost [8].

Shiok Meats offer a variety of cultivated meat products ranging from chicken to lobster, shrimp and crab. One signature product from Shiok Meats is the shrimp dumpling or more widely known as “Siew Mai”, launched in March 2019 [9]. Besides, they have also launched the world’s first cell-based lobster meat product in late 2020. The versatility of their cell-based seafood was presented through a myriad of dishes invested using creativity and innovation. Some of the seafood dishes available are Shiok shrimp and beet spheres (root vegetable infused broth with Shiok shrimp flavouring), Shiok lobster gazpacho (blend of tomatoes, leeks, red peppers, cucumbers, and extra virgin olive oil with Shiok lobster flavouring), as well as terrine of Shiok lobster (Shiok lobster blended with plant-based meat, served on a crostini with Shiok lobster mayonnaise) [9]. The feedback from the tasting event was mainly positive and the major praise point is on the umami flavours unleashed. Commercialization of these clean seafood will be realised by 2023 [9].

SingCell is a contract development and manufacturing company (CDMO) that offers clean meat in the form of adipose fat cells, myoblasts, mesenchymal stem cells and fibroblasts. Their current research and development is to produce automated scalable bioreactor that is capable of elevating cell count and viability for the goal of cost reduction [10]. Turtle Tree Labs secured a $30 million fund raiser in 2021 to launch their cell-based milk products in the United States via multiple business to business partnerships. Commercialization of these cell-based dairy products was targeted within the next four to five years [11]. Umami Meats had recently closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round in March 2022 [12]. This start-up is focusing on a myriad of cultured fish and seafood varieties. Besides improving their clean seafood maturing processes, they are actively conducting product demonstrations and taste tests to increase brand awareness [12].

Challenges and Limitations of the Cultivated Meat Industry

Some of the major challenges of the cultivated meat industry are production costs, cell line quality control, and consumer acceptance. One of the major production costs comes from the growth media, and the conventional growth media still necessitates animal source material such as the fetal bovine sera. Scientists have worked towards the formulation of cheaper and animal-free growth media that would not compromise the normal cell growth and at the same time provides additional enhancement in terms of nutrients and cell growth elevation [14, 15]. The cell line quality control is imperative to avoid the resultant unstable genetic content leading to undesirable functional and phenotypic variations. To solve this predicament, periodical quality control measures such as single cell sequencing are necessary to ensure the genetic stability of these cell lines [16]. The consumer acceptance and social image motivation are other challenges to the cultivated meat industry. Interestingly, a cross-country investigation across Singapore and the United States revealed that Singaporeans have shown stronger social image eating motivations and greater acceptance of cell-based meats [1]. These traits are believed to be contributed by the Singaporean’s kiasuism (fear of being left behind) and ‘trailblazers’ (vis-a-vis other nationalities) cultures [1].

Several main limitations and downsides of the cultivated meat industry has been highlighted by scientists like Roy, et al. [17] and Treich [4], namely the high energy consumption, carbon dioxide emission, ethical issues as well as effect on health. Cultured meat production requires at least 32710 MJ of energy (constant electricity) to keep the bioreactor running albeit its minimal land usage, this amount is 1.4, 1.2 and 2-fold more than the electricity sheep (23100 MJ), beef (27410 MJ) and pork (16300 MJ) farming utilized [17, 18, 19]. Moreover, the carbon dioxide amount produced from cell- based meat production is much higher than the methane synthesized from conventional farming and the period for these carbon dioxides to fully dissolve is longer comparatively [20]. To minimise the adverse effects of clean meat production to the environment, green energy is the proposed solution coupled with proper carbon dioxide gas conversion prior to release into the atmosphere. The use of fetal bovine sera in clean meat production has raised ethical issues as the bovine fetuses are obtained by the slaughtering of the pregnant cows [21]. Besides, the growth factors included in the growth medium of the in vitro meat production may impact human health in the long run [17]. The latter two limitations can be solved with the halt of utilizing fetal bovine sera in clean meat production and replace the growth medium with plant- based and animal-free medium.

Future Perspectives

In 2021, FAIRR Initiative named 2021 as the year of cultivated meat as a total of $506 million were invested globally into the clean meat firms, surpassing the past years [22]. This amount is a sixfold increment from 2020 [22]. This clean meat drive has been supported by celebrity investors like Leonardo Dicaprio, and industry giants like Tesco has made a commitment to opt for 3 times increment in meat alternatives sales by 2025 [22]. A study by Oxford Economics [23] uncovered that UK economy could receive a boost of £2.1 billion revenue and 16,50 jobs by 2030 from the cultivated meat industry alone. As mentioned in the previous sections above, the clean meat industry in Singapore is on an exponential growing trend. A number of start- ups such as Shiok Meats and TurtleTree Labs are preparing for commercialization of their products within a five-year window. One of the Shiok Meats co-founder, Sandhya Sriram

envisioned that people can grow meat at home within a decade [24].

The future of the cultivated meat production industry in Singapore is comparably promising and rewarding. Having the world’s first advantages of SFA sale approval and high consumer acceptance rate, Singapore will rise as a hub for the world’s leading clean meat and seafood producer in the near future. As the production costs decrease gradually with the scaling-up and alternative (plant-based and animal- free) growth media application, cultivated meat will be very competitive against conventional meat and even plant- based meat products. The production of seasonal, high value, unbreedable and near extinct seafood such as the empurau fish, unagi, salmon, striped catfish and groupers will be made possible with cultured meat to satisfy the increasing consumer demands [25, 26, 27]. And of course, with great power comes great responsibility, the advancement of this industry must be accompanied by the care for the environment. Ergo, green energy and waste gas release regulations must be implemented to the in vitro meat production industry, so that our main goal of employing cultivated meat to save the environment will not be corrupted.