SG OKs World’s First Facility to Mass Produce Lab-Grown Meat
SUSTAINABILITY

From Lab to Table: Singapore OKs World’s First Production Facility for Lab-Grown Meat

Lab-grown meat may soon reach your dinner table.

Esco Aster, a contract development and manufacturing organization, received the green light from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) to manufacture cultured animal cells.  With approval from the food watchdog, this could be the world’s first production facility of lab-grown meat. Cultured meat, which goes by a host of other nicknames such as clean meat, lab-grown meat, and cell-based meat, is created by harvesting cells from a living animal and growing them in a lab.

Announcing the SFA’s approval, Esco Aster said it uses bioreactors to manufacture high-quality meat from cultured animal cells in a sophisticated system that involves biotech, stem cell therapy, and bioprocessing. This provides an alternative to slaughter, a practice strongly opposed by vegans.

Esco Aster’s manufacturing facility, located in Ayer Rajah Crescent, also utilizes “positive pressure bubbles and pressure cascade with ULPA/HEPA filtered clean air within the cell culture aseptic core” to facilitate the end-to-end production process—from cell line creation to quality control for food consumption.






This is not the first time Singapore took the lead in clean meat adoption. In December 2020, the SFA okayed the sale of bite-sized cell-cultured chicken by U.S.-based startup Eat Just, the first nation to do so. That meat, however, is not purely lab-grown as it also incorporated plant-based protein such as mung bean.

Esco Aster hopes that with the SFA license, it will be able to help produce small batches of cultured animal cells for commercial market launch in Singapore. Many environmental groups have been calling for alternatives to traditional protein as meat production remains a key contributor to global warming.

The company also aims to address the gap in food production and make it more sustainable to meet increasing demand.

“COVID-19 and ongoing animal diseases such as African black swine fever, most recently mad cow disease in Brazil livestock exposed how fragile the current food ecosystem is on overreliance of importing of feed grains for animal feed, to domestic breeding of animal protein,” Esco Aster said.

“As consumption of animal protein is expected to increase to the point that we will run out of arable land in 2050, alternative forms of cell-cultured meat and alternative proteins can serve to supplement animal breeding for protein.”

Are you willing to try it?


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