Cultivated meat gains new approvals but remains far from mass-market sales
Singapore approved cultivated duck and beef in 2026, widening the sector beyond poultry and seafood. Production costs and limited capacity still restrict launches to selected restaurants, with no cultivated meat product yet sold at commercial scale.
Singapore expands the approved product range
Regulatory access for cultivated meat widened in 2026, but commercial availability continues to lag. Vegconomist reports that no cultivated meat product is currently sold at commercial scale anywhere, even as the global number of approved products approaches a dozen.
Singapore added two products during the year. In April, the Singapore Food Agency approved cultivated duck from French company Parima, six months after authorising its chicken. The decision made Parima the first company to secure approvals covering two species. It plans to target premium restaurants, including foie gras applications. On 4 August, the agency approved Aleph Farms’ Cultivated Thin-Cut Steak, making the Israeli company the only producer with regulatory clearance for cultivated beef.
Singapore first authorised cultivated meat for human consumption in 2020 and now has approvals involving Good Meat, Vow, Parima and Aleph Farms, as well as an animal-feed authorisation. It has overtaken the United States by number of approvals. Israel issued Aleph a conditional pre-market “No Questions” letter for its hybrid beef product under a pilot programme in early 2024.
Approvals do not guarantee volume
Five products have completed the joint FDA-USDA process in the United States: chicken from Upside Foods and Good Meat, salmon from Wildtype, pork fat from Mission Barns and poultry from Believer Meats. Believer Meats ceased operations shortly after its approval. National clearance also coexists with state-level bans, several of which are being challenged in court. Australia legalised sales through Food Standards Australia New Zealand in 2025, while applications remain under review in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and other markets.
The newly approved Singapore products are hybrids rather than products made entirely from cultivated cells. Aleph’s steak combines cultivated bovine cells with a plant-protein base, while Parima says its products contain “meaningful proportions” of cultivated cells. Aleph expects production in Singapore to begin in the first half of 2027, initially through selected restaurant partners and later in Israel.
Shared capacity becomes the operating model
Companies are increasingly using shared or contract infrastructure instead of financing individual plants. Aleph works with Singapore-based Cell Agritech, with additional scaling capacity in Penang, Malaysia, and manufacturing agreements in Switzerland and Thailand. The company is also pursuing what it says would be the first halal certification for cultivated meat.
Parima reported producing cultivated duck at multi-tonne scale in July through a single 22,000-litre run at partner Vow’s facility in Sydney. Vow described the site as the largest cultivated-meat production line built to date. According to Parima, the run cut production costs by 99% compared with earlier trials because of higher cell-culture yields and efficiencies from operating at greater volume.
Price competitiveness remains unproven at retail level. Arthur D. Little, which assessed the production run, identified a credible route toward about €10 ($11.65) per kilogram by the end of the decade. The Good Food Institute takes a more cautious view, saying that such a trajectory depends on continued research funding, investment in scale and regulatory progress. It identifies open, animal-component-free replacements for costly growth factors and proteins in cell-culture media as the main near-term opportunity, followed by food-grade alternatives to albumin, transferrin and insulin. For producers and investors, the latest approvals therefore provide regulated testing grounds, but not yet evidence of a mass-market business.
