Lab Grown Salmon Approved for Consumption in U.S. by FDA
Adding to the challenges of trying to appeal to American consumers, 6 states have already banned lab grown meat.
Back in 2023, when we reviewed the practicality of meat products grown from laboratory processes, a new study had just revealed that it was up to 25 times worse for the environment than real beef.
Despite the potential environmental impacts and lack of current technology to safely upscale production to meet current consumer needs, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved its sale to the public, clearing the way for two California companies to sell chicken produced from animal cells.
Now lab-grown salmon has recently been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), marking a significant milestone in the alternative protein industry. The approval was granted to Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cellular agriculture company, making it the first lab-grown fish to receive FDA clearance for public consumption in this country.
It’s already being sold in a Portland, Oregon restaurant.
The company made waves in the food and culinary sectors after announcing that its hero product, saku salmon, got approved in “a thorough pre-market safety consultation.”
Curious people can find the fish on the menu at Portland, Oregon, restaurant Kann — a James Beard award-winning Haitian spot by chef Gregory Gourdet.
For June, the cultured salmon will only grace the menu every Thursday night, but in July, it is slated to be a nightly offering.
What distinguishes the new product is that unlike the chicken and beef, this salmon is meant to be eaten raw.
Wildtype’s salmon is not the first lab-grown food to receive the FDA’s stamp of approval—that honor went to two companies’ cultured chicken in 2022—but this does mark the first time a lab-grown fish has earned the distinction. What makes Wildtype’s project particularly distinctive is its choice of salmon cut.
Unlike lab-grown chicken or beef, the company is creating sushi-grade “saku” cuts that are intended to be eaten raw. These uniformly cut blocks of fish are most often served as sashimi, and do not require any cook time.
To achieve this, Wildtype’s researchers first harvest living cells from Pacific salmon before transporting them for cultivation. In specially designed equipment, these cells are then grown in cultures with conditions similar to those in the wild fish itself.
These include fine-tuned pH levels, temperatures, nutrients, and other factors that induce the cells to develop to a point when engineers can harvest them. From there, the team integrates “a few plant-based ingredients” to help hone the flavor, texture, and appearance of wild salmon filets.
How are the chicken and beef products faring after approval? Production volumes for grown check remain low. For example, one company reports producing about 50,000 pounds annually, a small fraction of total U.S. chicken consumption.
Currently, though, the top two companies with FDA approval are cranking out small amounts of this stuff – one of them reports somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 pounds of product annually. That’s not a lot for a nation of over 350 million people.
Most of the early lab-grown meats are being put into pet food. However, keep an eye on GOOD meat and Upside Foods, two companies out of California that are pioneering this kind of innovation.
Adding to the challenges of trying to appeal to American consumers, 6 states have already banned lab grown meat.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen signed a lab-grown meat ban into law, making Nebraska the sixth U.S. state to do so.
“Lab-grown meat will continue to face pushback as people learn more about how it is manufactured,” said Jack Hubbard, executive director of the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW), one of the leading critics of lab-grown meat. “Consumers and lawmakers are understandably concerned about the lack of long-term health studies and use of immortal cells, so we expect the bipartisan opposition to lab-grown meat bans to keep picking up steam.”
Nebraska joins Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, and Indiana as the states that have enacted bans on lab-grown meat.
Additionally, Arizona and Iowa established rules requiring the labeling of these product, in terms of their laboratory origins. South Dakota passed rules this February that prohibit the use of state funds for research, production, promotion, sale, or distribution of cell-cultured protein, with some exemptions.
And while I have little desire to eat lab grown meat products, there may be benefits for those who enjoy salmon rolls.
Had a tour of @wildtypefoods a lab grown salmon (from cells!)
Very hard to tell the difference. I had a severe food poisoning from salmon a few years ago and was traumatized to eat raw salmon for quite some time.
The parasite free aspect of it definitely got me! pic.twitter.com/PcOLCZNqCD— Kojin Oshiba (@kojinoshiba) April 3, 2025
Image by perplexity.ai
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Comments
NOPE! I want real meat. I prefer wild Alaskan Salmon.
Me too, only wild, don’t trust anything else
Let’s test all these lab grown foods on Bill Gates and see whether or not he grows a 5th eye.
In case you didn’t know Gates is an in Upside Foods, one of the companies mentioned above that stands to profit from this development,
investor. investor. Gates is an investor in Upside Foods.
It’s as if American food isn’t bad as it is. I’m not going out of my way to buy plastic food if real food is still offered. As if IT isn’t mostly junk as it is.
Has the Sturgeon General weighed in on this?
I see what you did there…
Were they caught with lab grown nets and hooks?
I’m not a doctor or biologist of ANY kind. But, doesn’t this seem like it could be a bio-hazard nightmare? They’re growing animal tissue (I guess?) without the benefit of any immune system. Seems like it has the potential to go very, very wrong. Or, are they pumping this ‘meat’ full of antibiotics or other biological inhibitors (which also seems problematic)?
There is no need for antibiotics.
The technology they use to make this is not much different than the technology used to make beer (or drugs). It’s very, very well understood how to keep equipment sterile. Beer equipment has to be kept clean for the same reason: stray bacteria or yeast spoil the mix. To make this, they use a sterile nutrient bath and animal cells, much like beer is made from a nutrient bath and a particular yeast strain.
It’s much harder to keep the production line of a chicken processing plant clean because chicken are naturally filthy and carry salmonella, and you exactly cant autoclave or bleach them now can you? Best you can do on a chicken conveyor is keep the filth from spreading too far.
The Food and Drug Administration was not created to benefit the consumers, or the citizens of this nation.
Maybe but I think if it can be done in a cost efficient manner then it would be a great option for 3rd world countries in Africa to provide a low cost source of protein. The oceans are in real trouble through over fishing and this could take some of the pressure off.
Nope
We’re try to take all the crazy additives, colorings, fake food out from our diets and THEY APPROVE this crap?
Those two things really are not at odds with one another. Removing the various additives/dyes some potentially harmful some shown to be harmful makes purchase experience transparent for the consumer.
The consumer can buy normal products with greater confidence that what they are purchasing is safe. As for ‘lab grown’ so long as it is prominently labeled as such then those consumers who want to make the decision to buy it should be able to do so. Lots of.folks have an odd hangup about hunting/fishing and the harvesting of game animals including fish, as if normal hamburger somehow originates at the grocery. The ‘lab grown’ stuff provides an alternative for them. Creating an informed choice with transparent labels and removal of questionable additives is IMO a good policy.
in very large amounts phytoestrogens (from soy) may lead to gynecomastia, but that would require (IMHO) eating a huge amount of this product daily
Don’t really care where my food comes from if it’s healthy but I’m skeptical of many things.
1. That it can be healthy
2. That it can be economical.
3. That it can be a “green gain” for natural resources
It would be economical due to the economy of scales.
Economical as compared to what? Some lab processes are not scalable; I don’t know if this one is or isn’t.
Ah say, it’s a joke, son.
Nit to pick.
Food can’t be “healthy”. YOU can be healthy or unhealthy, based partly on the type and amount of stuff you throw down your neck, but the dead food on your plate cannot be.
Plus, lab grown proteins are not “meat” any more than soybean burgers are; they are lab grown proteins. Meat is muscle tissue (and a few organs) and this stuff is not that.
If they are willing to label it “lab grown protein based on a Gallus gallus domesticus cell line with added factors” then I’m jiggy with that.
healthy…for people to ingest. I just shortened it for the list version and I figured most would understand.
And neither is something “healthy” to ingest. It can be harmful or beneficial, but health is a state of living organism.
Sorry… words mean things.
Fair point though it would be more accurate to describe being individually ‘healthy’ in terms of lifestyle as a combo of our daily exercise plus the types and amount(s) of foods we eat.
Some.foods have no real nutritional value, like delicious Krispy Kream donuts. Other foods consumed in moderate amounts are far more beneficial aka ‘healthy’. It is a fair colloquial use of ‘healthy’ to apply the term to some foods within this context. For example, apples off your own tree where you know exactly the presence and level of pesticides/chemicals used, when it was picked, how it moved and was handled/stored.from tree to table. It seems very pedantic to demand no use.of common phrasing on a comment board. This isn’t an academic paper being presented for peer review/publication in some esoteric, minimal reach, obscure journal…its a comment board for generalists to offer opinions.
Well, you’re wrong because it’s not healthy for people to ingest rat poison despite the fact that strychnine is not alive. Everyone who speaks the English language knows exactly what I’m talking about or carry on being your special brand of “Rain man” (I put that in quotes so hopefully you can recognize that it’s figurative.
Apparently the process they use isn’t that much different from what allows cancer cells to grow unchecked. No thanks.
more like the process of making beer
How can anyone trust the FDA after all the lies and terrible things they have approved? It used to take years to get a drug approved because they did long term testing. Now they approve some drugs within months with no idea what the long term effects are.
They are counting on a gillible public.
no person with greater than a room temperature IQ should ever trust the FDA; as seen with the COVID vaccine, they all march to the beat of the lead drummer – or they lose their jobs
Even IF it were able to satisfy all objections about it being ‘safe’ and actually tasted the same, I’d still want it banned.
Why? Because we all know exactly where this would go.
The microsecond the left thinks it’s ‘normal’, they’ll try to ban animal meat because ‘climate change’. And then they’ll start screwing around with the lab meat.
Bingo. Witness the “smart gun” law in NJ that was such an obvious Trojan Horse that it instantly cratered any genuine market for smart guns.
If you think you have the right to ban this, then why shouldn’t they ban real meat? What makes your preference for real meat better than their preference for this product?
Because “real meat” is not a genetically modified product like laboratory produced test-tube chicken slime And if a ban is not feasible then strict labeling laws must be imposed that force the users of this genetically altered, laboratory produced, test-tube chicken slime to clearly label, preferably on the front of the package in a font and in a size easy to see and read, that the food product contains artificial meat product so that the consumer may make an informed choice in what they buy and consume.
And please don’t tell me that isn’t feasible because the federal government already requires food manufactures to label their products if they contain any “GMO” ingredients. If food manufacturers can do that they can also at least be required to label their products for containing genetically altered, laboratory produced test-tube chicken slime.
Sorry, meant artificial salmon meat. Not chicken. Brain just isn’t working today,
So what? You’re just restating the obvious fact that the two products are different, without giving even a hint of a reason why one is better than the other. Your personal preferences are not objective reality, and are meaningless to anyone but you. Oh, and this meat is not slime. Not that there’s anything wrong with slime, but this is not it.
(I assume you are referring to the perfectly good genuine meat product that the unscrupulous lefty news industry stuck with the unattractive nickname “pink slime”, and so destroyed the market for it. That was a travesty, but it’s irrelevant here.)
Why?
What right did it have to do that? More lefty interference that no conservative should support.
But in this case there’s no need to require labeling since the manufacturers would of course label it of their own accord, since the origin will be a selling point. Especially if it’s going to be more expensive than real meat.
Well, if you can’t see the difference there’s not a whole lot I can say that will convince you otherwise. Suffice it to say chicken (or salmon) produced naturally on a farm is different than chicken slime produced in a laboratory test-tube (or vat) by artificial genetic manipulation in a test-tube.
My “personal preferences” as you put it are held by more than just me. There is a large number of the population that would prefer not to be force fed artificial muck created in a vat by artificial genetic manipulation. If you want to eat that slime then by all means do so. But don’t force it on everyone else.
You do realize that they aren’t pulling chicken legs, and chicken breasts and whole salmon fillets out of those big industrial vats, right? Nope. When the time is right, they connect the hose, open the stopcock on the vat and pump the chicken/salmon slime out of the vat and down the line for further processing the result being chicken slime or salmon slime. Certainly not chicken legs or salmon fillets.
No, I meant the slime that they pump out of the industrial tanks after they are done growing it in the liquid medium and then process. What comes out the other end is just chicken slime or salmon slime.
Because there is a large number of people in the population that would rather minimize or avoid altogether eating foods that contain artificially genetically manipulated food ingredients. I understand that’s hard for you to fathom because it sounds like you’d eat any muck they put in front of you but there we go and here we are.
By the same “right” that the federal government mandates “nutrition fact labels” on every package of food produced and also dictates exactly what must be included on those labels. That right. So it wouldn’t be hard for the government to mandate a label warning people that the product contains an artificial meat slime ingredient. That way consumers may make their own informed judgement whether or not to consume the product.
BWAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . snicker. . . . snort . . . Pull the other one Milhouse. They might do that until they realize that it really isn’t a “selling point” to indicate clearly to consumers that the product they are offering the consumer contains chicken slime or salmon slime. Or is oomposed wholly of those artificial products.
And if it is going to be more expensive than real meat (chicken, salmon etc) then what’s the point. Consumers will purchase the cheaper conventionally produced farmed chicken or farmed salmon and not pay for the higher priced artificially grown products. Happened with those plant-based hamburgers and such and will happen here. Not many will opt for the more expensive option if a cheaper one is available.
Real meat is genetically modified just not with modern laboratory techniques. They’ve been selectively breeding all food animals for 10,000 of years.
I’m all in favor of requiring labelling of all products. People have a right to know what they are consuming and to make a choice,
It’s a stretch to claim that selective breeding is in the same camp as genetic modification/ bioengineering.
Selective breeding as it’s been done for thousands of years doesn’t involve test tubes and gene splicing.
It’s the difference between playing matchmaker and playing God.
I agree with you!
Once you give the morons in government an inch, they’ll begin to think they can take the whole f00t – legally.
Look at what they did with the COVID vaccine – it was no longer a choice, it became a “Sie müssen! Heil Hitler!”
I would buy this product if its price were competitive with real meat. And I don’t care about its “environmental impact”. If it upsets the Greens that would be a plus for me.
The fact that production isn’t nearly enough to feed the whole nation is irrelevant; they’re not trying to sell this to the whole nation. It can be a niche product, but there’s a niche for it in the market and the government should not be forcibly preventing it from filling that niche, any more than it should be banning real meat for those who want it.
I agree – for those who want it, assuming no risk to human health, I’m fine with it being sold. It’s not really being sold as food of course. It’s merely a novelty item.
If you’ll forgive the analogy it’s the Cybertruck of foods. The Cybertruck is a functional truck – just not a very good substitute for a real one. Same here. Its popularity is in its novelty. Same here. It’s overpriced for what you get and so on and so on.
In closing let me say I like Soylent Green. Some of my best friends are Soylent Green.
I prefer the book to the movie. And in the book soylent is just what it sounds like, and there is no cannibalism. They had no business introducing that in the movie.
Yeah, the price point would be a major determining factor for me, personally. The fact that the article makes exactly zero reference to cost and it’s being rolled out exclusively in some trendy if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it gourmet restaurant in Portland, OR strongly suggests that that price point is going to be eye-wateringly high. It’s basically the seafood equivalent of a Peloton. Fine for an elitist niche product, and it may eventually filter out into the mass market, but not going to revolutionize the industry anytime soon.
On a side note, in every sci-fi novel I’ve ever read that includes vat-grown meat (or any other pseudo meat), if there’s a natural option the upper strata dines on that while the proles have to content themselves with the artificial stuff. I find it amusing that here our supposed betters are paying extra for steerage food.
L₃o₂x and bagels…
if not banned it MUST be labeled
as lab grown
Exactly, if they will not ban it then this genetically-altered, laboratory test-tube produced chicken slime then food producers need to be required to clearly label their products as containing this chicken slime product.
And when they list it on the ingredients list they should here required to list it as “Artificial Chicken Food Product” and not be able to list it simply as “Chicken”.
Once again, it’s not slime.
And “pink slime” was a perfectly good product, and it’s awful that the lefties destroyed the market for it.
Once again, what they get out of the vat isn’t pretty little salmon fillets or chicken legs and breasts. What they do is attach the hose to the industrial vat, open the stop-cock, and pump the resulting chicken slime or salmon slime down the line for further processing and storage in industrial barrels until called upon for use by the food industry.
Why should it be labeled that way? You’re just trying to destroy the market for it, out of your own irrational prejudices.
But don’t worry, there’s no way the manufacturers would want to hide its origin, especially while the price remains higher than that for real meat.
Why should it not be labeled as “salmon product”? It comes from a test tube, so it’s not real salmon, any more than “beyond meat” is real meat or Velveeta is real cheese. Just because it tastes (nearly) the same doesn’t mean it is the same.
Clearly label it as artificial (which it is) and showcase it in its own grocery section, far away from the genuine stuff.
It’s bad enough that they’re slipping bioengineered ingredients into packaged foods with a teeny tiny disclosure buried in the ingredients list. If it’s so great, why not trumpet it front and center on the package? Why be so coy?
I don’t trust these clowns.
And therefore there isn’t a market as most consumers would chose the lower cost alternative (the farm raised chicken or salmon) over the more expensive item (the artificially produced chicken/salmon).
Lab grown meat is how the lunar colonies and Martian colonies will have sushi and chicken nuggets.
Eventually, improvements in this technology will also enable human organ growth for transplants.
Politicians reactionarily banning things is how suppressors came to be on the NFA. Ban politicians from getting involved in technological progress. If people want to try this then well, who cares?
This is a niche product, but if it gets one vegan to try meat, well…
And, don’t forget- the devout can eat it during Lent.
Um… you can eat REAL fish during Lent. Fish ain’t meat.
Um….I was replying to DWB who had broadened the topic to lab grown meat -end um…..
They’ll probably start with flavored spirulina or something similar that’s less energy- and time-intensive to grow in vats than this stuff (which I notice according to the NYP article includes ‘a few plant-based ingredients’ to ‘imitate the texture and appearance of true salmon’).
Make it or don’t make it, whatever.
I’m just not living upstream from the factory.
Well, you’re wrong because it’s not healthy for people to ingest rat poison despite the fact that strychnine is not alive. Everyone who speaks the English language knows exactly what I’m talking about or carry on being your special brand of “Rain man” (I put that in quotes so hopefully you can recognize that it’s figurative.
Indexing not working again….could be my internet signal.