\San Francisco-based food technology company Eat Just, Inc. is set to debut its lab-grown chicken meat in a restaurant in Singapore later this week. The company - backed by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing - will make culinary history as being the first to serve paying customers its lab-grown products.
Several dishes using the company's artificial meats will be served at the 1880 restaurant near the InterContinental Hotel in Singapore. It will mark the first-ever commercial sale of cultivated meat globally.
Eat Just's chief executive officer, Josh Tetrick, said that they plan to expand into other retail establishments across Singapore in the coming months.
"I am really proud at the moment. This is the first group of people to consume meat which did not require the killing of animals," Tetrick said.
Members of the 1880's private dining club will be served four courses that will incorporate the company's animal cell-cultivated chicken meat.
According to Eat Just's menu, the courses will include crispy sesame chicken in a bun with spring onion and pickled cucumber, crispy cultured chicken in a maple waffle with spices and hot sauce, and a phyllo puff pastry with black bean puree.
Unlike plant-based meat, the products made by Eat Just are technically real meat. The company uses cells extracted from animals, which are then grown and inside a lab using a combination of tissue engineering, biotechnology and unique synthetic processes.
The company - founded in 2011 - initially started out by manufacturing mung bean-based artificial eggs, which it had sold under the brand Just Egg. The company soon expanded into creating cultured-cell meats.
Investments from Singapore's Temasek Holdings and Li Ka-Shing's Horizons Ventures further contributed to the company's expansion into becoming one of the world's largest unicorns.
Eat Just said that the adoption of its lab-grown meats should bring about a healthier, cleaner, and more sustainable food system for society as a whole.
The company said that it is preparing to mass-produce its cultivated chicken. To achieve this, the company said that it will be utilizing hundreds of bioreactors capable of creating "kilos of chicken" during one production run.
The startup, which is currently valued at over $1.2 billion, is aiming to achieve profitability before the end of the year.
