Image: Aleph Farms.
Singapore has approved the sale of a cultivated beef steak, with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) giving the green light to Aleph Farms' Cultivated Thin-Cut Steak. It is only the second approval for cultivated beef anywhere in the world, and the first outside Aleph's home country of Israel.
Aleph Farms grows its beef from non-modified cells taken from a premium Black Angus cow, so no animal is slaughtered to make it. The Thin-Cut Steak is a hybrid: the cultivated beef cells, between 10% and 20% of the product, sit in a plant-protein base made of soy and wheat. It will be sold under the Aleph Cuts brand, starting in restaurants in the first half of 2027, with Singapore manufacturer Cell Agritech producing it locally.
The approval was a long time coming. Aleph filed its application with the SFA in September 2022, and according to Green Queen it is the sixth cultivated meat product cleared in Singapore.
Co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia said:
Singapore has built one of the world's strongest ecosystems for cultivated meat, and this clearance allows us to move toward scaling-up our commercialisation in Asia on a capital-efficient footing.
Singapore was the first country in the world to set up a regulatory framework for cultivated meat, and Aleph describes the review as a pioneering process rather than a product moving through an established pathway. The company and the SFA worked through scientific questions that had never been assessed for cultivated meat before, generating extra data as the framework itself evolved. Yifat Gavriel, Aleph's chief of regulatory affairs, said the approval shows the product meets one of the most rigorous novel food frameworks in the world.
Aleph is now waiting on regulators in Switzerland, the UK and Thailand. The EU is still dragging its feet: applications are working their way through the European Food Safety Authority, but as FoodNavigator reported this year, no EU approval has been granted yet. (Come on, Brussels.)
Why does this matter to us? Beef is by far the most damaging meat for the planet, and every steak grown in a tank instead of on a cow means less land cleared and fewer animals bred for slaughter. Oxford University researchers found that shifting the world to plant-based diets would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 66%. Plants are still the simplest swap of all, and this one is already half plant.
Singapore has led this from the start, when it became the first country to approve lab-grown chicken in 2020. Since then the US approved lab-grown chicken, Israel approved Aleph's cultivated beef, and Australia approved cultivated quail. Back in 2017 we reported on a vegan startup making 4 million burgers a month, and even Tyson Foods' CEO said the future of food might be meatless.
This is just the beginning.