Lab-Grown, State-Banned, and Fork-Ready as Cultivated Meat Crashes the American Menu

Scott Mathias
Jul 26
2 min read

It's been a busy week in the US. While Florida bans the future and Alabama clutches its steak knives, the United States just became ground zero for one of the most delicious science experiments in human history. Cultivated meat companies are done waiting. They’ve broken out of the lab and into the lunch rush.

Source: Mission Barns - Believer Meats - Wildtype

San Francisco’s Mission Barns is now USDA-approved to sell cultivated pork fat. That’s right—sell it. Legally. In meatballs. In bacon. In actual restaurants and grocery chains. The company just cleared its final hurdle: label approval, facility inspection, and a full USDA thumbs-up. Now they’re rolling into Q3 with product hitting the menus at Fiorella and shelves at Sprouts Farmers Market in the Bay Area. The label says: "Cultivated meatballs. Contains real pork without the pig.” Let that line sink in. What was once theoretical is now sizzling and seasoned.

Meanwhile, Believer Meats just ticked FDA safety clearance off the checklist for its cultivated chicken. USDA label approval is next, and it's coming. But that’s not even the real story. The company also announced completion of the world’s largest cultivated meat facility in Wilson, North Carolina. At 200,000 square feet and with a projected 10,000 metric tons of output annually, it's not just big—it’s disruptive by design. If this industry had a front-runner for commercial scale-up, it's Believer. They’re not doing PR. They’re doing production.

Over in seafood, Wildtype isn’t playing catch-up, they're plating up. Their cultivated coho salmon, already cleared by the FDA, is now appearing on menus in some of America’s most acclaimed restaurants. In Portland, Kann, helmed by Top Chef winner Gregory Gourdet, has been running Wildtype salmon on select nights since June and is now shifting to daily service. Next up are Otoko in Austin and Robin in San Francisco. These aren’t PR stunts. They’re Michelin-pedigree tastings of a food system that no longer needs oceans, nets, or bycatch to deliver quality fish.

And that brings us to the take that matters. We've been tracking this for years - every grant, every prototype, every chicken nugget grown in a lab. But this week? This week was different. This was the week cultivated meat stopped being a promise and started being a product. USDA approvals, FDA clearances, supply chains clicking into place. Consumers won’t be reading white papers. They’ll be reading menus. Some will order meat not coming from an animal because of ethics. Some because of curiosity. Some because the chef said it’s good. Doesn’t matter. The barrier has cracked, and the flood is starting.

Sure, the culture wars are heating up. Several U.S. states, backed by legacy meat lobbies, are pushing bans on cultivated products. But while governors cry about ‘fake food’, federal regulators are green-lighting the future. And it's arriving with speed, panache, and a dash of rosemary.

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