🐔 Israel’s SuperMeat has announced groundbreaking innovations to make cultivated chicken affordable. With fat produced in 24 hours and muscle in four days, SuperMeat is able to deliver high yields at speed.

These advancements enable SuperMeat to produce chicken at $11.79 per pound at scale, which is on par with pasture-raised premium chicken in the US. This breakthrough marks a crucial step toward the commercialisation of cultivated chicken.

SuperMeat’s robust cell line that reaches industry-leading densities of 80 million cells per millilitre in just nine days – without genetic modifications or animal components. This fast-growing, high-density culture is maintained over extended periods, ensuring a continuous production cycle that enables consistent high yields.

The company has significantly reduced media costs to under $0.50 per litre, by replacing expensive animal-based ingredients, such as serum and albumin, with affordable animal-free alternatives. After six days in culture, the cells independently produce essential growth factors, allowing for a reduced feeding regimen of only 1.5 vessel volumes per day, making the entire process more efficient and cost-effective.

Efficient tissue differentiation for greater volumes in short cycles

SuperMeat’s ability to increase cell weight lies in its use of embryonic stem cells, enabling the production of both muscle and fat tissues directly from animal cells. Muscle and fat cells are nearly double in size, cutting costs by almost 50%.

Fat is produced within just 24 hours and muscle in four days – leading to faster production cycles and higher volumes. SuperMeat says that this approach delivers the full sensory experience of chicken, providing the texture, taste and nutrition consumers expect from conventional meat, while advancing cost efficiency at scale.

SuperMeat’s process begins with a nine-day cell growth phase to reach high cell densities, followed by a 45-day period where meat mass is harvested daily while the remaining cells continue to grow. In a compact 10-litre bioreactor run, this continuous process produces around 66 pounds of cultivated chicken, demonstrating the high efficiency of the system, which requires minimal space and resources compared to conventional methods.

🍗 Once the continuous process is established, SuperMeat can produce 3 pounds of meat – the equivalent amount of edible meat received from slaughtering one chicken – in 2 days, compared to the 42 days it takes to raise and process a traditional chicken. Additionally, with current production parameters, cultivating 1kg (2.2 pounds) of chicken requires 80% less land than conventional chicken farming.

When scaled to an industrial plant, SuperMeat’s process is projected to produce 3 million kilograms (6.7 million pounds) of cultivated chicken per year, equivalent to around 2.7 million chickens. Achieving this with traditional farming methods would demand vast resources, including extensive land and infrastructure for farming.

Ido Savir, CEO and co-founder of SuperMeat, said: “Current sentiment around cultivated meat includes scepticism regarding its scalability and market readiness, with concerns that cultivated meat may be more hype than a viable alternative. Our new report provides proof that with the right technology there is a commercially viable path to market. We see a tremendous opportunity for affordable cultivated chicken meat that supplies the same delicious taste and nutrition as premium chicken, which is a path for consumer and market acceptance and long-term adoption.”

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