Dutch cultured meat firm Meatable holding first EU tasting today

The Dutch company Meatable will let people taste a sausage made from laboratory-grown on Wednesday, a first for both the Netherlands and the European Union. The sale of lab-grown meat is not yet permitted anywhere in the EU as safety reviews have not been completed, but the Netherlands introduced rules last year that make it possible to organize tastings.

Singapore made it possible to sell cultivated meat a few years ago. As a result, Meatable previously organized all of its product tastings in the Asian city-state. The premiere in the Netherlands will be judged by a panel, including a chef in Leiden who can delve into cultured meat.

Meatable, founded in 2018, has developed a method in which cells from an animal are grown in a bioreactor into muscle and fat tissue used for consumable products. This is the future of food, the company said. The demand for meat is expected to continue to rise. Cultured meat would be one solution to limit additional deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.

There are also critical voices about the environmental benefits of cultured meat. Researchers from the University of California calculated last year that greenhouse gas emissions from this type of meat will be many times higher than from feeding and slaughtering cattle or pigs.

This is mainly because purifying the nutrients for cells consumes an enormous amount of energy as long as it is handled in the same way as in the pharmaceutical industry. These conclusions have not yet been assessed by other scientists.

Meatable claims to use “groundbreaking” methods that shorten the time to make a sausage from cultured meat. According to the company, it only takes four days for a cell to grow into a sausage, which also reduces energy and water consumption.

Producing cultured meat is currently very expensive, making it difficult to compete with meat products made from slaughtered animals. Last year, Meatable raised 30 million euros in investments to further develop production methods.

Half of that money came from Invest-NL, an investment fund of the Dutch government. In 2021, investors put up 47 million euros for Meatable. The Dutch firm DSM-Firmenich was among the investors.