Lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cultured meat, is produced by taking a small sample of animal cells, feeding them nutrients in a controlled environment, and coaxing them to multiply and mature into muscle tissue outside the animal’s body. The whole process borrows heavily from biomedical tissue engineering, but the goal is food rather than organ repair. While the basic sequence can be summarized in five broad steps, each one involves its own set of scientific puzzles, and the industry is still working through several of them on its way toward affordable, large-scale production.
Step 1: Collecting Cells from a Living Animal
Everything starts with a tissue biopsy. A small sample of muscle tissue is taken from a living donor animal, often a cow, chicken, or pig. The procedure is comparable to a veterinary biopsy and does not require the animal to be slaughtered. From that sample, researchers isolate stem cells that have the ability to multiply and eventually become muscle fibers. The most commonly studied cell types include satellite cells (the adult stem cells naturally responsible for muscle repair), mesenchymal stem cells, and induced pluripotent stem cells, each with different trade-offs in how easily they grow and how well they turn into muscle.1International Journal of Food Science and Technology. Cultured meat: advances in stem cell biology, tissue engineering, and bioprocess optimisation for scalable and sustainable production—a review
Satellite cells are the workhorses of most current research because they are already primed to become skeletal muscle, but they come with a catch: they can only divide a limited number of times before they lose steam. That limited lifespan means companies using satellite cells may need repeated biopsies from donor animals, which adds complexity and cost.2PubMed Central. Cultured beef: from small biopsy to substantial quantity Induced pluripotent stem cells, by contrast, can theoretically multiply indefinitely, but reprogramming them and then steering them back toward becoming muscle adds its own layers of difficulty. Selecting the right donor animal and optimizing the biopsy process matters more than it might seem; the quality and viability of the initial cell population sets the ceiling for everything downstream.
Step 2: Feeding the Cells with Culture Media
Once the cells are isolated, they need something to eat. In cell biology, that “something” is called culture medium: a liquid bath of sugars (usually glucose), amino acids, vitamins, minerals, lipids, and growth factors that together give cells the raw materials and chemical signals they need to stay alive and divide.3Future Foods. Cell culture media for cultivated meat: Review and perspectives on first principles design to drive cost-effective scale-up Each ingredient class plays a somewhat distinct role: amino acids, fatty acids, and carbohydrates supply energy and building blocks for new cells, minerals act as regulators of growth and muscle production, and vitamins both protect cells from oxidative damage and help switch on growth-related genes.4Future Foods. The roles of media ingredients in muscle cell culture for cultured meat production—A mini-review
The elephant in the room for years was fetal bovine serum (FBS), a blood product collected from unborn calves at slaughter. FBS has been the gold standard supplement in cell culture for decades because it contains a rich cocktail of growth factors, hormones, and nutrients that keep cells happy. Conventional lab recipes call for a medium supplemented with about 10 to 20 percent FBS.3Future Foods. Cell culture media for cultivated meat: Review and perspectives on first principles design to drive cost-effective scale-up But relying on a slaughterhouse byproduct undercuts the whole animal-welfare argument for cultivated meat, and FBS is expensive and variable in quality. This has pushed intense research into serum-free alternatives, including formulations that use plant-derived and insect-derived protein isolates to replace what FBS provides.5ACS Food Science & Technology. Sustainable Alternatives to Fetal Bovine Serum: Evaluating the Role of Plant and Insect Protein Isolates in Serum-Free Media for Bovine Satellite Cell Proliferation in Cultivated Meat Production
Getting the culture medium right is not just a scientific challenge; it is the single biggest cost driver. Medium currently accounts for somewhere between 55 and 95 percent of the final product cost, depending on the formulation. Growth factors and signaling proteins like albumin, transferrin, and insulin are used in relatively high concentrations and are expensive to produce at scale. Most of these proteins can be made through microbial fermentation, but the supply chain is still built for the tiny volumes that academic labs and pharmaceutical companies need, not the enormous volumes a food industry would demand.6Current Opinion in Food Science. Towards resource-efficient and cost-efficient cultured meat
Step 3: Scaling Up in Bioreactors
A petri dish can grow a few million cells. To make something that resembles a meaningful amount of food, you need bioreactors: large, sealed, temperature-controlled vessels that maintain the precise conditions cells need while providing fresh medium and removing waste. Think of them as highly engineered fermentation tanks. The cells are kept at body temperature, in a sterile environment, with carefully controlled pH, oxygen levels, and nutrient flow.7PubMed Central. Bioreactors, scaffolds and microcarriers and in vitro meat production-current obstacles and potential solutions
One key innovation at this stage involves microcarriers, tiny spherical beads made from materials like gelatin, alginate, or synthetic polymers. Muscle cells are adherent, meaning they need a surface to cling to in order to grow. In a liquid-filled bioreactor, microcarriers provide that surface. Their small size gives them a large total surface area relative to volume, so a bioreactor packed with microcarriers can support a dense population of cells.8International Journal of Food Science and Technology. Cultured meat: advances in stem cell biology, tissue engineering, and bioprocess optimisation for scalable and sustainable production—a review – Section: Scaffold and structural engineering in cultured meat Researchers are increasingly developing edible microcarriers so that they do not need to be removed from the final product, which simplifies downstream processing.
Scaling bioreactors is one of the hardest engineering problems the industry faces. Maintaining even temperature throughout a very large vessel, distributing nutrients uniformly, and removing metabolic waste products like ammonia and lactate become progressively more difficult as volumes increase. Some researchers are exploring ways to reduce the buildup of those waste products through genetic engineering of the cell lines themselves, physicochemical adsorption, or biocatalytic conversion, all with the goal of keeping cells productive for longer runs.9Trends in Food Science & Technology. Cell culture medium cycling in cultured meat: Key factors and potential strategies
Step 4: Scaffolding and Tissue Maturation
Multiplying cells in a bioreactor gives you a mass of individual cells or thin sheets, but meat is not just a collection of loose muscle cells. Real meat has structure: fibers aligned in one direction, connective tissue, fat marbled through the muscle. To get anything resembling that texture, cells need a scaffold to grow on and organize around.
Scaffolds function like a temporary skeleton. They give cells physical cues about which direction to align, how to cluster, and when to start differentiating from generic stem cells into mature muscle fibers. Historically, the scaffolds used in this field have been made predominantly from animal-derived collagen and gelatin, which is somewhat ironic for a technology trying to move away from animal agriculture. To align with the environmental and ethical motivations behind cultivated meat, researchers are increasingly exploring plant-derived biomaterials.10PubMed. Scaffolds for the manufacture of cultured meat One recent approach uses 3D bioprinting to create scaffolds from alginate and gelatin hydrogels supplemented with protein hydrolysates derived from plants like soybean and wheat, as well as edible insects like crickets and mealworms.11PubMed. Bioengineered Lab-Grown Meat-like Constructs through 3D Bioprinting of Antioxidative Protein Hydrolysates
Once cells are seeded onto a scaffold, the process of differentiation and maturation begins. The cells stop dividing and start fusing together into the elongated, multinucleated fibers that make up skeletal muscle. This is essentially the same biological process that happens during muscle development in a living animal, just recreated in a lab setting. Electrical or mechanical stimulation is sometimes applied to encourage the fibers to contract and develop the proteins responsible for texture. The whole sequence, from initial cell culture through differentiation and maturation, mirrors what one review describes as a six-part chain: muscle sampling, tissue dissociation, primary culture, scaled-up culture, differentiation and maturation, and harvest.12PubMed Central. Muscle stem cell isolation and in vitro culture for meat production: A methodological review
Step 5: Harvesting and Forming the Final Product
After the cells have matured into something resembling muscle tissue, the product is harvested from the bioreactor. If edible microcarriers or scaffolds were used, they can remain in the product. If not, the tissue needs to be separated from any inedible support structures. The harvested tissue is then processed into a food product.
At this point, cultivated meat faces one of its most honest challenges: it does not yet taste or feel like conventional meat on its own. The tissue produced is typically lean muscle without the complex arrangement of fat, connective tissue, and vascular networks found in a steak or chicken thigh. Color, flavor, and juiciness all depend on molecules and structures that do not automatically emerge from a bioreactor. Making cultivated meat that is biologically equivalent to traditional meat in terms of sensory and nutritional qualities is an active area of research, and researchers have outlined that texture, color, and flavor all need focused engineering work.13PubMed Central. Sensorial and Nutritional Aspects of Cultured Meat in Comparison to Traditional Meat: Much to Be Inferred
For now, the most commercially realistic products are ground or minced formats, where the tissue is blended with fats, binding agents, and flavorings to create something like a burger patty or nugget. Whole-cut products resembling a steak or chicken breast remain a longer-term goal, because recreating the intricate three-dimensional architecture of intact muscle tissue at meaningful scale is a problem no one has fully solved.
Keeping It Safe and Sterile
Because cells grow in a warm, nutrient-rich liquid, the same conditions that make cells happy also make bacteria very happy. Contamination is a persistent practical problem. An industry survey found that cultivated meat producers reported an average microbiological contamination batch failure rate of about 11 percent, with bacteria as the most commonly reported contaminant and personnel, equipment, and the production environment as the most common vectors.14PubMed Central. Cultivated meat microbiological safety considerations and practices That failure rate is expected to be manageable at commercial scale through a combination of food-safety frameworks already used in other industries, including hazard analysis protocols, good manufacturing practices, and good cell culture practice.
Beyond microbial contamination, there are less familiar safety questions unique to cultured meat. These include the genetic and epigenetic stability of cell lines over many rounds of division, possible chemical hazards from growth factors and scaffold materials, allergenicity of novel ingredients, and long-term toxicological uncertainties that simply have not been studied yet because the products are so new.15Journal of Food Safety. Cultured Meat as a Novel Food: Emerging Food Safety Challenges, Risk Assessment Gaps, and Regulatory Readiness None of these are reasons to panic; they are the normal set of questions regulators work through for any genuinely novel food category.
Where It Is Legal to Sell
Regulatory approval varies widely by country. Singapore was the first country to approve the sale of cultivated meat, and the United States has developed a joint regulatory structure in which the FDA oversees cell collection, cell banking, and cultivation, while the USDA takes over at the harvesting and labeling stage.16PubMed Central. Cell-Based Meat Safety and Regulatory Approaches: A Comprehensive Review A handful of other countries are developing their own frameworks, but most of the world has no specific regulatory pathway for cultured meat yet. For consumers, this means availability is still extremely limited, and what you can buy depends heavily on where you live.
The Environmental Picture Is Complicated
A common selling point for cultivated meat is that it will be far better for the environment than conventional livestock farming. The reality is more nuanced and depends heavily on assumptions about energy sources. One life cycle assessment found that cultivated meat is roughly three times more efficient than chicken, the most efficient conventional animal, at turning crops into meat, which translates to low agricultural land use. Nitrogen-related pollution and air emissions are also lower because the process happens in a contained system without manure. However, production is energy-intensive, and the climate benefit depends on the energy mix: with renewable energy, the carbon footprint can be lower than beef and pork and comparable to chicken, but that advantage disappears with fossil-fuel-heavy grids.17The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. Ex-ante life cycle assessment of commercial-scale cultivated meat production in 2030
A separate analysis painted a starker picture for current production methods. Across various scenarios, the global warming potential ranged from about 80 percent less than median retail beef at the optimistic end to more than 25 times greater at the pessimistic end. Every scenario that used highly purified growth medium ingredients came in at 4 to 25 times the greenhouse gas emissions of median retail beef. Fossil fuel depletion was also higher for all cultured meat scenarios compared to the lowest benchmark for conventional beef.18ACS Food Science & Technology. Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat: A Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment The greenhouse gas profile is also qualitatively different: cultivated meat emissions are mostly carbon dioxide from energy use, while conventional meat emissions are dominated by methane and nitrous oxide. That distinction matters for long-term climate modeling because methane is a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas, while COâ‚‚ accumulates for centuries.
The honest takeaway is that cultivated meat could be a significant environmental improvement over beef if it is produced with clean energy and if culture medium ingredients can be manufactured efficiently. But those are big “ifs,” and at current production scales, the environmental case is not yet proven.
The Cost Gap
The first cultivated beef burger, produced by Mark Post’s team in the Netherlands in 2013, reportedly cost around $2.3 million per kilogram. That figure has dropped dramatically, with recent estimates putting costs at roughly $63 per kilogram, but that is still far too expensive to compete with conventional meat at the grocery store.19PubMed Central. Scaling Cultured Meat: Challenges and Solutions for Affordable Mass Production The dominant cost driver, as noted earlier, is the culture medium. Replacing expensive pharmaceutical-grade growth factors with cheaper recombinant alternatives produced by fermentation, and replacing serum with plant-based supplements, are two of the most active research fronts aimed at closing that gap.
Achieving price parity with conventional meat will also require bioreactor engineering to support much higher cell densities than current systems manage, cell lines that can be expanded many more times without losing their ability to become muscle, and a supply chain for medium ingredients that operates at food-industry volumes rather than pharmaceutical volumes.6Current Opinion in Food Science. Towards resource-efficient and cost-efficient cultured meat None of these problems are theoretically unsolvable, but solving them simultaneously at scale is an engineering challenge that the industry has not yet demonstrated.
Why Acceptance Depends on More Than Taste
Even if the cost and taste challenges are solved, consumer acceptance is not guaranteed. A large review of 179 studies published between 2015 and 2025 found that the most influential psychological factors shaping attitudes toward cultivated meat include food neophobia (a general reluctance to try unfamiliar foods), perceptions of naturalness, disgust reactions, trust in the companies and regulators involved, and how the product is labeled. Cultural norms and religious dietary models also play a significant role, and acceptance varies considerably across societies.20Journal of Sensory Studies. The Role of Sensory Perception in Cultured Meat Acceptance: Integrating Psychological and Cultural Perspectives
The “naturalness” question is particularly thorny. Many people feel intuitively that food grown in a bioreactor is less natural than food from a farm, even when the biological processes involved are essentially the same. Whether the industry frames the product as “lab-grown,” “cultivated,” “cell-based,” or “slaughter-free” turns out to matter: different labels trigger different associations around purity, authenticity, and technological intervention. The review also flagged a methodological concern that applies to almost all consumer research in this space: most studies ask people how they feel about a product they have never actually tasted, under hypothetical conditions. Attitudes measured that way may not predict real purchasing behavior once the products are widely available and people can try them firsthand.
Cultivated Seafood and Other Species
The five-step process described above is not limited to beef. Researchers are applying the same basic framework to chicken, pork, and various species of fish and shellfish. Fish cells often grow at lower temperatures and can tolerate different oxygen conditions than mammalian cells, which creates different bioreactor engineering requirements. Some seafood species also have simpler muscle structures, which could make the scaffolding challenge somewhat easier. The commercial logic for cultivated seafood is strong: wild fisheries are under severe pressure from overfishing, and aquaculture carries its own environmental burdens. Whether cultivated seafood reaches the market before or after cultivated beef or chicken remains an open question, but the foundational biology overlaps substantially, and several startups are pursuing fish, shrimp, and other aquatic species in parallel with mammalian meat programs.