Will lab-grown meat ever be affordable?

The objection

“It’s a rich man’s science project. It’ll never be cheap enough or big enough to matter.”

The answer

The first lab-grown burger, unveiled in 2013 by Mark Post, who went on to found Mosa Meat, cost €250,000 to make and was funded by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin [1]. In 2019 Mosa Meat said it expected commercial production to bring a burger down to €9, and further efficiency gains to take it to about €1 within a decade [1]. Seven years on, Mosa Meat is not among the eight companies that the Good Food Institute (GFI), a non-profit that promotes alternative proteins, lists as having regulatory clearance anywhere [2]. Food regulators have cleared cultivated meat for sale in Singapore, the US, Israel, and Australia and New Zealand [2][11][12], so it has left the lab, but whether it can be made cheaply and in bulk is a harder question, and the evidence so far mostly favours the sceptics. None of this bears on whether a vegan diet is expensive today, since one can be built on beans, grains and vegetables that are already in the shops.

How much does lab-grown meat cost to make?

Several times as much as ordinary meat: even the lowest-cost scenario in a 2021 model by the Dutch consultancy CE Delft, commissioned by GFI, came to $6.43 a kilo for a plant built in 2030, more than three times the roughly $2 a kilo that CE Delft took as the cost of producing conventional meat [9]. Two other engineering models came out far higher. In a 2021 analysis, David Humbird estimated that animal cells grown in 20,000-litre fed-batch tanks would cost $37 a kilo to produce, and $51 a kilo in a perfusion plant, where fresh growth medium flows continuously through smaller 2,000-litre tanks [3]. He took about $25 a kilo of cells as the threshold for an affordable food, and reckoned that even at that cost a product made entirely from cells would reach the supermarket at $50 a kilo or more, the price of a premium cut, paid for mince or nuggets [3]. Growth media made from cheap plant hydrolysates might bring the fed-batch cost under $25, he thought, though he noted that hydrolysates able to serve as a complete growth medium did not yet exist [3].

A 2023 model of cultivated beef plants by Negulescu and colleagues came to $35 a kilo with 42,000-litre tanks, $25 with 211,000-litre tanks and $17 with 262,000-litre airlift reactors [4]. A 2024 study in Nature Food by Pasitka and colleagues, several of whom were affiliated with Believer Meats, a cultivated meat company that also funded the work, put cultivated chicken from a theoretical 50,000-litre plant at $6.20 a pound, about $13.70 a kilo, which they placed within the range of organic chicken [10]. The shop price of ordinary meat already covers the distribution and profit that the CE Delft, Humbird and Negulescu figures leave out, and US shoppers paid an average of $6.79 a pound for minced beef in September 2026, about $15 a kilo, according to the US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [5].

Can lab-grown meat be made on the scale of livestock farming?

Not yet: the largest cultivated meat plant in the world, Vow’s in Sydney, has reached production at 20,000-litre scale and has 35,000 litres of capacity in all, according to GFI’s 2026 industry report [6]. Humbird’s modelled fed-batch plant had twenty-four production tanks of that size and 649,000 litres of bioreactors in all [3], and the 2023 model assumed production tanks of 42,000 to 262,000 litres, with a whole imagined industry of several such plants making 100 million kilos of beef a year, about 0.14% of the world’s beef [4]. Humbird found that animal cells grow slowly, use their food inefficiently, are held back by their own waste and are damaged by stirring, all of which limit how large a tank can usefully be and how densely the cells grow in it, while plants with enough safeguards against microbial contamination are costly to build [3]. The money has shrunk too: by GFI’s count, cultivated meat and seafood companies raised $144 million in 2024 and $73.9 million in 2025, a year that saw “a handful” of company closures [6]. One company has cut the price by using very little of it: in 2024 Eat Just’s GOOD Meat brand began selling a product in a Singapore butcher’s that was 3% cultivated chicken, a formulation its chief executive said would let it sell at a lower price [7].

Will lab-grown meat ever be as cheap as ordinary meat?

Not with the methods in use today, according to Goodwin and colleagues’ 2024 review in Nature Food of the published cost analyses, which concluded that under the current technological approach cultivated meat is unlikely to compete with conventional meat [8]. The reviewers saw possible savings in plant-based ingredients for the growth medium, food-grade sterile conditions and much larger supply chains, and listed problems research has yet to solve, among them getting cells to mature without serum and new designs of bioreactor [8]. Humbird likewise judged cheaper plant-based media and more efficient cell metabolism to be necessary for cultivated meat to displace the conventional kind, though not enough on their own [3]. CE Delft’s best case of $6.43 a kilo needs savings across “nearly all aspects of the business case”, in its own words: a plant that uses little growth medium and buys it cheaply, much lower prices for the growth factors and other proteins in the medium, cells of a larger volume, shorter production runs, which it said give a less mature product, and investors willing to wait thirty years to be paid back [9]. Commercial projects usually have to pay back within four years, CE Delft noted, and on that basis its best case came to around $13 a kilo, which it called “still substantially higher” than the $2 benchmark for conventional meat [9].