A U.S. company wants to offer cell-grown chicken at supermarkets and grocery stores by the end of 2021.
UPSIDE Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats, discussed this plan while speaking with Yahoo Finance on Tuesday.
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“We’ll have meats that are humanely and sustainably raised to plates in 2021,” Dr. Uma Velti, the CEO of UPSIDE Foods said.
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The company’s website adds, “It will be available by the end of this year, pending regulatory review.”
Velti clarified in the interview with Yahoo Finance that the company is working with the Food and Drug Administration as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ensure that the cell-cultured meat is safe to sell.
Cell-grown meat, also called cell-cultured or lab-grown meat, is more or less exactly what it sounds like — meat that is grown from an animal’s cells that does not require raising and slaughtering an animal.
It may sound like science fiction, but the idea of growing just meat has been around since 2013, when a Dutch company, Mosa Meat, produced the first lab-grown beef burger.
According to a blog post by UPSIDE Food’s CEO, who is also a trained cardiologist, the company first produced a meatball in 2016 and then produced the first cell-cultured chicken and duck meat in 2017.
UPSIDE Food has since seen investment from corporations like Tyson Foods and billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, according to its website.
The company said on its website it is building a “pilot plant facility” so that it can accommodate “commercial scale production.”
So far, no definite date or price for the cell-grown chicken has been set. UPSIDE Food also has not yet announced where the meat will be available for purchase.