Cultivated meat is produced by taking animal cells and growing them in a facility.
It's not considered vegetarian because it's actual meat, but it's expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve water and conserve land. On top of that, animals don't need to be slaughtered.
Now it's another step closer to reaching your plate.
Eric Schulze with Upside Foods says the U.S Agriculture Department approved cultivated meat for sale in the U.S.
Upside Foods and its competitor and colleague Good Meat secured a grant of inspection which is needed before they can sell their products to the public.
"Simply put, our goal is to try to help transform the food system," Schulze said. "That journey of a thousand steps, starts with just one, and that is selling our cultivated meat products. We'll be doing that here in the Bay Area at a local restaurant working with three michelin star chef Dominique Crenn. We'll be getting it into consumers hands and plates and mouths and getting feedback and then growing our supply so that we can sell it to more and more people."
Schulze says they are still years away from selling at grocery stores because first they need to scale up production. He says Upside Foods is currently designing its first commercial-sale facility that would produce 10 to 20 million pounds of cultivated meat per year.
How cultivated meat will be listed on the menu really depends on each restaurant. Schulze says some chefs may want to call it slaughter-free meat, or climate-friendly meat. Either way, he expects we'll see many more cultivated meat producers obtain approval in the coming years.