Where can you buy lab-grown meat?

The objection

“You keep talking about this future food. So where is it? I can’t buy it anywhere.”

The answer

For most people that is still true. Cultivated meat, grown from animal cells, has been cleared for sale in only a handful of countries, and the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes alternative proteins, lists just three places where it can currently be sold: Singapore, the US and Australia [15]. A country’s food regulator has to clear it before it can be sold there, and some governments have banned it before it reached the shops.

Where can you eat lab-grown meat now?

Lab-grown meat is served mostly in a small number of restaurants in Singapore, the US and Australia, going by the launches reported in 2025, and only a few sales have been for cooking at home. In the US, Wildtype’s cultivated salmon was due to be on the menus of four restaurants by late August 2025, in Portland, San Francisco and Seattle, and for a limited time in Austin before Texas’s ban began (Green Queen, 2025) [16]. Mission Barns, whose cleared product is pork fat, put meatballs and bacon made with it on a San Francisco restaurant’s menu in September 2025. It then announced a limited sale on 1 November 2025, at an independent grocery in Berkeley, California, of meatballs mixing the fat with plant protein at $13.99 a pack, and billed it as the first retail sale of cultivated meat anywhere (vegconomist, 2025) [17]. Vow’s cultured quail went onto the menus of 12 restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne from July 2025, and in late October Vow began selling three quail products online to people in Sydney to cook at home, among them a spread at A$14.99 a jar. Vow had already been selling the ingredient to restaurants in Singapore since its approval there in April 2024 (Green Queen, 2025) [18]. Some earlier US offers have stopped or were one-offs: in January 2025 The Takeout reported that GOOD Meat, whose chicken a Washington DC restaurant began serving in July 2023, had paused its tastings, and that UPSIDE Foods’ chicken had been served at a single tasting in New York in December 2024 [1].

Where is lab-grown meat approved?

Singapore, the US, Israel, and Australia and New Zealand have cleared cultivated meat for people to eat, and Singapore was the first country to do so, in 2020 [1][2]. Its food agency said in October 2025 that the products it had approved included cultivated meat from Eat Just and Vow [3], and FoodNavigator counted three cleared there by February 2026: chicken from GOOD Meat and from Parima, and Vow’s quail [2]. Singapore then cleared Parima’s cultivated duck in April 2026 [13] and, in August 2026, Aleph Farms’ Cultivated Thin-Cut Steak, which is 10 to 20% cultivated beef cells on a plant-protein base and which Aleph plans to launch in restaurants in the first half of 2027 (FoodNavigator, 2026) [14].

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration completed its first two safety consultations, both on chicken, in November 2022 and March 2023 [4]. The Department of Agriculture, which oversees cultivated meat and poultry once the cells are harvested, granted the two companies, UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat, inspection in June 2023, and the first sales followed in July 2023 (Congressional Research Service, 2023) [12]. The FDA completed three more consultations in 2025, on salmon, pork fat and a third chicken [4]. FoodNavigator lists the five products as coming from UPSIDE Foods, GOOD Meat, Wildtype, Mission Barns and Believer Meats, and reports that Believer closed in December 2025 [2].

Israel’s health ministry approved Aleph Farms’ cultivated beef for sale to the public in December 2023 and announced it in January 2024, calling it the first approval of its kind in the world [1][5]. In June 2025 Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the agency that sets food standards for both countries, changed their shared code to allow Vow’s cultured quail cells, mixed with other ingredients in products such as logs, rolls and patties and labelled “cell-cultured” or “cell-cultivated” [6]. Canada had not followed: Health Canada’s list of completed novel food safety assessments, last updated in September 2026, includes no cultivated meat [19], and its page on cellular agriculture says most such products are likely to need a safety assessment before they can be sold [7].

Can you buy lab-grown meat in the UK or EU?

Neither the UK nor the EU has approved cultivated meat as food for people, though the UK has cleared it for pet food. The UK’s Food Standards Agency says cell-cultivated products are not currently available to buy in the UK [8], and no EU authorisation had been granted by February 2026 [2][9]. In March 2025 the FSA started a regulatory sandbox, a forum in which companies including Mosa Meat, Gourmey, Hoxton Farms and Vow talk regulators through how they make their products [8]. In September 2026 it told its business committee that the applications were still at the initial risk-assessment stage, and that finishing two safety assessments by February 2027, when the programme ends, “remains the target”, though that depends on applicants answering its requests for information fully and in time [10]. Meatly’s cultivated chicken was approved for pet food in the UK in 2024 [2][9]. In the EU, the French company Gourmey applied in 2024 to sell cultivated foie gras, and the Dutch firm Mosa Meat applied a year later for cultivated beef fat (FoodNavigator, 2025) [20]; both applications were still under review in December 2025 (Euronews, 2025) [9].

Where is lab-grown meat banned?

Italy and at least eight US states have banned cultivated meat, and Hungary’s parliament has voted for a ban too. Italy’s 2023 law bans it, with fines of up to €60,000, though analysts quoted by Euronews (2025) call the law potentially unenforceable because Italy passed it before the EU’s scrutiny period for new national technical rules had ended [9]. Hungary’s ban went through that procedure, but the European Commission has warned that it could threaten the free movement of goods [9]. In the US, Florida and Alabama banned sales in May 2024 [1], by June 2025 Mississippi, Montana, Indiana, Nebraska and Texas had followed [11], and in March 2026 South Dakota became the eighth state, banning its manufacture, sale and distribution from July 2026 to June 2031 [21][22]. Indiana’s ban runs from July 2025 to June 2027 and Texas’s from September 2025 to September 2027, unless they are extended [11]. UPSIDE Foods, one of the companies cleared by US regulators, sued Florida over its ban [11], but in March 2026 a federal appeals court upheld the refusal to block the ban while the case continues, ruling that federal poultry inspection law does not override it (DTN, 2026) [23].