2025: The Year the Market for Fake Meat and Insect Products Began to Collapse
In 2026, grocery aisles will reflect “back-to-basics” eating and a “return to real” when it comes to meat and dairy.
As the calendar flips to 2026, shoppers are doubling down on the real deal.
Despite the globalist narrative drive and the mainstream media push, consumers are choosing real meat and dairy products and passing on lab-grown steaks and cricket protein snacks. After years of hype around futuristic food tech, signs show that people aren’t buying what the experts are selling.
Some recent stories show that 2026 will see the return to real food options. To begin with, Ÿnsect, once the largest insect‑protein producer in Europe, is essentially bankrupt after failing to secure the financing needed to continue its operations and execute its restructuring plan.
Ÿnsect said via a statement that it “has been unable to secure the necessary financing for its continuation plan within the required timeframe,” citing “difficulties faced by startups in climate-related or agricultural sectors in raising funds.”
Ÿnsect will close its industrial-scale facility near Dole. The Keprea facility will continue, with a new focus on producing fertilizers from insect waste.
In a statement, Emmanuel Pinto, president of Ÿnsect, said the company “now has solid technologies and an operational model, even though the required funding could not be secured in time.
“We hope that the significant technical and industrial skills developed by the teams at Ÿnsect, along with the established business relationships, will find productive use and contribute significantly to both Europe’s protein independence and the fight against climate change.”
As PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado notes, it is at least one positive sign that the population of Europe has not completely rolled over to the globalists yet:
But when people have a choice, only a very small number of them will willingly eat worms and scorpions and ants instead of hamburgers and roast chicken and bacon. Certainly, the elites never follow their own advice by cutting meat entirely in favor of crickets and grasshoppers. And globalists have not yet succeeded in so impoverishing and crushing European citizens that most of them cannot afford meat and have to grub up alternatives. So naturally, the insect production company went out of business.
Eerst Meatable en nu dit. Wat een geweldig nieuws zo laat in het jaar.
— Ing. Drs. Willy Wokkelworst 🇳🇱 (@noescom1977) December 30, 2025
Next on the list of related stories is an Israeli‑founded cultivated meat startup that developed cell‑based meat products, which also ran out of funding.
A lab-grown cultivated chicken breast made by Israeli-founded startup Believer Meats. (Courtesy)Israeli-founded startup Believer Meats, a biotechnology firm that creates chicken, lamb and beef products made from animal cells, has been forced to shut down its operations after running out of funds.
The decision was announced by Believer Meats global HR & talent leader Anne Schubert, who wrote on LinkedIn: “After two years of building something truly bold and special, Believer Meats made the difficult decision last week to cease operations.”
“While the outcome is not what any of us hoped for, I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished together,” Schubert said.
Believer Meats, formerly known as Future Meat Technologies, which has operations in Israel and the US, did not explain or share further details about the closure, and did not respond to requests for comment when contacted by The Times of Israel.
Italy and Hungary have Banned Lab-Grown Meat.
"Our land is fertile, livestock healthy, our people will not be poisoned with fake meat."
Do you support Meloni and Orbán? 🇮🇹🇭🇺 pic.twitter.com/bPdQkgvF2b
— Based Hungary 🇭🇺 (@HungaryBased) December 30, 2025
Finally, over the last week, Meatable (a Dutch cultivated meat startup) is closing after failing to secure sufficient new financing.
The company was founded in 2018 in Delft and later moved its operations to Leiden. Agronomics, which invested millions of euros in Meatable, said the startup faced a mix of expected and unexpected risks and uncertainties this year and was unable to obtain adequate funding from existing shareholders or new investors.
“Although this outcome is disappointing, we believe the decision has been taken responsibly and in the best interests of all stakeholders,” Agronomics CEO Jim Mellon said in a statement.
Meatable launched seven years ago with plans to bring lab-grown meat to the market as a sustainable and animal-friendly alternative to farms and slaughterhouses. The company staged the European Union’s first-ever cultivated meat tasting, which was held in 2024 in the Netherlands, but it struggled to get its food on the shelves over safety concerns.
The European Union does not yet permit the sale of lab-grown meat, prompting Meatable to focus on the Singapore market. It also intended to bring products to the United States, but has had difficulty overcoming concerns about cultivated meat.
I predict that in 2026, grocery aisles will reflect “back-to-basics” eating and a “return to real” when it comes to meat and dairy.
Hopefully, the American cattle and poultry markets will be protected and expand in 2026 to meet the needs of the "return to real" meat. https://t.co/FQu2vgGAvo
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) December 31, 2025
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Comments
A Israeli‑founded cultivated meat startup that developed cell‑based meat products ran out of funding? That is absolutely impossible because Jews control the banks or so I am told.
I had a veggie burger once…once.
That’s as close as I ever came to eating phoney meat, and it won’t happen again
Subway had a veggie burger that I liked and used to sometimes get. It had no resemblance to meat. I have no issue with veggie burgers as long as they are represented as such.
These products aren’t traditional veggie burgers, because they’re actually trying to taste and feel and behave like meat, but they’re never represented as actual animal meat, because their entire selling point is that they’re not. I’m a potential customer for them, but not all the time, and not if they’re as much more expensive than real meat as they are when introduced. But if they got enough market acceptance that the price could come down to something reasonable I would buy them occasionally or even regularly.
Exactly. Where I am their veggie burger (and there are two types of them) is actually cheaper than much of their meats. The one I like is a patty with the same shape and size as their rib patty. I often have them put marinara sauce on it.
They built these companies with the expectation that the insane corrupt bureaucrat ‘experts’ were going to outlaw real meat and they were going to be the only option.
But the unwashed masses simply were never going to allow that to happen, so now all these companies are collapsing because nobody wants what they make.
If they were expecting that then they’re idiots and deserve to fail. But I don’t think that was their expectation. On the contrary, I think they thought they would be able to negotiate past government regulations without too much expense, and found that they couldn’t. Or they just overestimated their potential market, and therefore legitimately failed, but someone else will eventually try again and succeed.
I think that this began as a a lab experiment to grow proteins very similar to beef… which succeeded. Great excitement all around and funding to continue! Hooray! We have work for another year! And then: something that I can be guilty of – they fell in love with their own idea, and so did the venture capitalist. Think Doctor Frankenstein creating life. OF COURSE he couldn’t resist the temptation. He knew though, that things could end badly… but… imagine if!
And so – to market, to market! Of course they knew that it would never be a big success, but they -hoped- there might be a niche. They might market it as “saving the planet ®️” but they would have been thrilled to sell any. They did it because they could, and they would be first!
Even in failing there will be a feeling of satisfaction. I doubt if any individual venture capitalist bet the farm on it so they’re not really hurt financially.
WTH do you need fake meat for?
Cows are vegans. So steaks and burgers are vegan meat.
We don’t need fake meat. We also don’t need real meat, or newspapers or guns.
OK, many people do need guns, but not necessarily the kinds they want. AR-15s are rarely necessary; for most purposes there are adequate substitutes.
But that shouldn’t be the issue. A free market should be able to give us what we want, not just what we need, and it should be able to give it to us even if we’re a minority, and most people don’t want the things we want, so long as our minority is big enough to make it worth someone’s while to supply us with what we want.
Kamala, is that you?
Huh?! What on earth is that supposed to mea? YOU are Kamala, asserting that we should only get what we need.
You should try eating your own word salad, Kammy.
Put some Ÿnsect bug juice on it if you like.
Btw, it is obvious you have no idea how free markets work.
if true
then its one of the few things the 60’s hippies..now americas lefty/city leaders have failed in forcing us to live with
There are already alternatives to hamburgers for vegetarians without pushing fake meat. I don’t eat them, but some meat-eating friends like black bean burgers. I have eaten a grilled portabello mushroom burger and liked it. It offers me an option for my friends who don’t eat meat. But nobody pretends either option is meat.
Then there is the Netherlands
Who murdered 60% of their cows
A$$holes
If a company ever managed to grow meat in a lab that was actual meat and identical in every way (flavor, texture, nutritional value, preparation, and price) to ‘on the hoof’ meat, I could be persuaded to buy it. These pseudo meats are non-starters.
That’s what they’re trying to achieve, and they’re not far off on all those points except price. I’m willing to pay a little extra for these products, but not as much extra as they would have to charge initially. I’m in the category of “second adopters”; I want to wait for the early adopters to bring the price down to something reasonable.
I find this sad. In a free market they wouldn’t need any government approval, but could just take their products directly to the consumer and let people decide whether they want it. There’s definitely a market for such products, but not at any price point.
I would buy such products, but only if they taste like the real thing and are priced comparably to the real thing.
They would have to be less then the real thing for me to purchase. If it’s that same price I would get the real thing.
Well, that’s you. I would pay extra for fake meat, but not all the time, and not a huge amount extra.
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