Cultivated meat – “it’ll never be a thing”. Well, things are only impossible until they’re not. SuperMeat is now serving “crispy cultured chicken fillet” burgers! They’ve just opened “the world’s first test kitchen serving a menu of dishes developed from cultured chicken grown directly from chicken cells, all under the same roof. Our first test kitchen is near Tel Aviv in the city of Ness Ziona.”
The restaurant has a glass window onto the production floor as well as an open kitchen. They see transparency and consumer education as an essential part of the process. The menu includes 2 “crispy cultured chicken fillet” burgers, one standard and one “Spicy fall” flavoured. Tasting panels performed by SuperMeat showed that the product is “indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken”
They can currently produce “several hundred pounds” of chicken weekly and plan to launch in restaurants in 2021/22. They hope to reach commercial scale in 5 years and price parity soon thereafter. If they manage to meet this timeframe that’ll be well before many other projections. Particularly for chicken, as it’s the most efficient and cheapest of the conventional animal proteins. I would have thought perhaps twice that amount of time as a minimum, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Huge congratulations to Ido Savir and the whole SuperMeats team. I just wish I could jump on a plane to Israel tomorrow and try the product.
It’s definitely on my 2021 list of things to do!
