US-based alternative proteins manufacturer Eat Just has secured its first retail listings for its cell-based meat.

Good Meat, the group’s cell-based meat arm, will see its cell-cultivated chicken – sold under the Good Meat 3 brand – at Huber’s Butchery in Singapore. The product will only comprise 3% cultivated chicken, with the rest made of plant-based ingredients.

The business said it has always used a small percentage of cultivated chicken in its cell-based products in combination with plant proteins. It added such a mix "helps reduce costs associated with the production of cultivated meat, one of the main challenges that exist to scaling this developing industry”.

Good Meat 3 will be priced at S$7.20 ($5.34) for a 120-gram package and will be available for the remainder of 2024, going on sale officially tomorrow (16 May).

“This is a historic day, for our company, for the cultivated meat industry, and for Singaporeans who want to try Good Meat 3,” Eat Just co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick said.

“Before today, cultivated meat had never been available in retail stores for regular people to buy, and now it is. This year, we will sell more servings of cultivated chicken than have been sold in any year prior. At the same time, we know there is much more work to be done to prove that cultivated meat can be made at large scale, and we remain focused on that objective.”

Good Meat has been selling its products in Singapore since November 2020 when it became the first business in the world to be granted approval to sell lab-grown meat.

In June last year, Good Meat’s products were also cleared for sale by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), alongside another local peer, Upside Foods.  

In February, Upside Foods announced it had paused plans to build a new full-scale commercial plant in Glenview, Illinois. That same month it also indicated ending its contract with the Bar Crenn restaurant in San Francisco, California, as it looked to serve its products “on the road through events”.

Last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that bans the sale of lab-grown meat in the US state.

In January, Alabama state senators introduced a similar bill which has gone to the US Senate for approval. Last year, the state of Texas also passed a law that would require cultivated meat products to include front-of-pack messaging that indicates they are “cell-cultured” or “lab-grown”.

Andre Huber, executive director at Huber’s, said: “Having the latest version of Good Meat 3 cultivated chicken available for retail is another step in this journey to make cultivated meat available to a bigger audience.”

Plant-based non-profit Good Food Institute (GFI) said: “Whether today’s retail announcement was motivated by business savvy, culinary curiosity, or pure economic necessity, we’re all going to learn some important lessons from it.”