Only one restaurant in Texas sells lab-grown meat. Lawmakers banned it anyway.

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Lab-grown meat isn’t being sold in Texas grocery stores or featured on most restaurant menus. In July, Austin sushi restaurant OTOKO began putting Wildtype’s cultivated salmon on its menu, making it the first and only restaurant in Texas to sell a lab-grown product.

Despite the lack of widespread sales of lab-grown meat, also called cell cultivated meat or cultured meat, lawmakers in June passed a law to ban its sale in Texas for the next two years, starting Sept. 1.

Lawmakers approved the ban because of concerns that the cultured meat industry could disrupt traditional livestock markets and family farms, as well as concerns about product labelling.

“It’s a preemptive position for us,” said Carl Ray Polk, Jr. a fifth-generation rancher in East Texas and president of the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association who testified in support of the bill in a March Senate committee hearing. “We want to put this in a moratorium, at least a two-year ban, until everything checks and the balances are there for them to take the product to retail.”

Scientists and experts in cellular agriculture say the ban appears to be a political move that will have little to no impact on the market, since cell-cultivated meat, which is derived from animal cells and grown in bioreactors, isn’t being sold on a large scale yet.

“It seems more like a statement than anything that’s going to have lasting impact,” said Dr. Kate Krueger, a cell biologist who previously worked as a scientist at Perfect Day Foods and now does technical evaluations for biotech companies focused on cell-based meat.

Supporters of the industry say that it can be a more ethical and sustainable food source. It promises to help meet the rising consumer demand for meat without killing animals and without the risk of viruses that animals can carry.

The industry is relatively new. After a surge of investor interest in the mid 2010s, funding for the industry has lost momentum in the past two years.

In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave approval for two companies, UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat, to sell cell-cultivated chicken and a year later, the U.S. Department for Agriculture approved the label of “cell-cultivated chicken” for the products. Since then, both companies have sold the product to U.S. restaurants.

Today, four companies have government permission to sell cultivated meat in the U.S., according to The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on advancing innovation in alternative proteins.

“We did bespoke [tasting] events and continue to do many events in multiple states in the United States to make people familiar with it as we produce it at small scale,” said Uma Valeti, the CEO and founder of UPSIDE Foods.

This scale, however, is too small to have an impact on the market, according to scientists.

“It’s a nice proof of concept, but, you know, that's not really having an impact on the consumer market,” said Paul Mozdziak, a professor at North Carolina State University who has been teaching cell culture since 1992. “It is something that's highly specialized and something that only somebody at a high-end restaurant is going to eat.”

While the new state law bans selling cultivated meat, it does not ban research and development, which Katie Kam is grateful for. Kam, an Austin native and longtime vegan who dreams of selling a cultured barbecue beef brisket from a food truck, is the founder of BioBQ, the only cultivated meat startup based in Texas.

BioBQ is not currently offering any products for sale, but Kam worries that the ban will have a “chilling effect” and deter already hesitant investors.

“Now investors aren't so sure that Texas is friendly to business, and they don't want to invest in businesses where they're not even sure the product can be sold,” Kam said.

Tamar Lieberman, the state legislative specialist at The Good Food Institute who testified against the ban, equated it to Texas saying “we don’t want new jobs, we don’t want new investments.”

Polk, the president of the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, said he is concerned about cultivated meat being blended with conventional meat.

“We don’t want a [cell cultured product] to be able to be blended into 100% beef,” Polk said.

Polk also wants reassurance that the cultivated meat industry will follow truth in labelling laws after the two-year ban ends. If the products are blended with other ingredients, he believes that should be made clear to consumers.

“We welcome any competition,” Polk said, pointing out that the beef industry has been competing with poultry, fish, and now plant-based proteins. TSCRA’s goal, he said, “is not to squash economic development or free markets.”

Valeti said that Polk’s concerns about labelling are “unfounded.” UPSIDE Foods, he said, is asking for a label to call their products “cultivated meat.”

Mozdziak, the North Carolina State professor, said he doesn’t believe cultivated meat can be called “meat” at all.

“You can call it cultivated chicken, but you can't call that meat,” Mozdziak said. That’s because the industry typically uses fibroblasts, a type of cell that grows connective tissue.

“Most of the companies are not producing meat, they're producing connective tissue,” he said.

Connective tissue does not have the same protein levels of conventional meat since it contains no muscle tissue.

Valeti said that his company uses a variety of cells to create cultivated products, not just fibroblasts. While the protein content of UPSIDE products may differ, he aims to get it to a place where it’s similar to conventional meat.

Mozdziak said he believes cultivated meat will eventually be the solution to a safer, more secure food supply without the risks of diseases like the bird flu. But he doesn’t see that happening any time soon.

The Texas ban, he said, “is pure politics.”

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