Can Cultivated Meat Ever Compete With a €5 Chicken?

In 2013, the world's first cultivated beef burger reportedly cost around €250,000 to produce. It became the industry's defining proof of concept: evidence that meat could be grown from animal cells without raising and slaughtering the whole animal.

A little over a decade later, that scientific question looks considerably less outrageous. Cultivated meat has received regulatory approval in several countries, production methods have improved, and researchers are now modelling costs that at least resemble something recognisable as food rather than biotechnology.

The economic question is proving less cooperative.

Conventional chicken is already one of the cheapest and most efficiently produced meats in the world. In April 2026, the average EU market price for broiler chicken was around €3 per kilogram. The exact price at a supermarket obviously varies, but the point of the €5 chicken is not really the five euros. It is what those five euros represent: an industrial food system that has spent decades becoming extremely good at producing affordable meat.

Cultivated meat is therefore not competing against an outdated industry waiting to be disrupted. It is competing against breeding, feed optimisation, enormous supply chains, specialised processing, established factories and decades of accumulated efficiency.

That makes chicken a particularly unforgiving benchmark.

The question is no longer simply whether we can grow meat. It is whether we can grow it cheaply enough for ordinary people to keep buying it.

There are reasons for optimism. A 2024 study published in Nature Food demonstrated continuous production of cultivated chicken using an animal-free growth medium costing just $0.63 per litre. Using those results to model a theoretical 50,000-litre production facility, the researchers estimated that cultivated chicken could eventually be produced for around $6.20 per pound.

That is an extraordinary shift from a €250,000 burger.

It is also still a model.

Several of the researchers were affiliated with cultivated-meat company Believer Meats, and the facility being modelled does not yet represent mature mass production. The study matters because it shows a plausible route toward dramatically lower costs, not because cultivated chicken has suddenly reached supermarket economics.

A broader review of cultivated-meat economics published the same year reached a less celebratory conclusion. Under current technology, cultivated meat is still unlikely to compete directly with conventional meat on price. Getting there would require cheaper ingredients, better production systems, different equipment and supply chains that do not yet exist at the necessary scale.

This is where cultivated meat runs into a problem familiar to many technologies born in laboratories. Proving that something works and proving that it works cheaply millions of times are very different achievements.

The cells themselves need food. They grow in carefully controlled liquids containing nutrients and other ingredients that help them multiply, and those liquids remain expensive. A 2024 scientific review estimated that they account for at least half of the variable operating costs in cultivated-meat production. Then there are the tanks, contamination control, energy, equipment and the challenge of keeping enormous quantities of living cells healthy enough to produce food reliably.

A €250,000 burger only had to work once. A €5 chicken has to work millions of times, every day. That is where impressive science meets very ordinary economics.

Consumers are unlikely to solve the problem by happily paying a large premium either. Euroconsumers research across four European countries found that 61% of respondents believed cultivated meat would only succeed if it were affordable to everyone. Just 15% said they would consider buying it if it cost more than conventional meat, while almost half expected cultivated meat to be cheaper.

Curiosity might persuade someone to try cultivated chicken once. Price decides whether it becomes dinner.

But there may be another route, and it is arguably more interesting than waiting for a fully cultivated chicken breast to beat industrial poultry at its own game.

What if cultivated meat becomes affordable by using less cultivated meat?

Many emerging products combine cultivated animal cells with cheaper ingredients rather than attempting to grow every gram of the final product from cells. Plant proteins can provide much of the structure, while cultivated cells or fats provide some of the flavour, texture and other qualities that alternatives struggle to reproduce.

A 2025 study pushed that idea surprisingly far. Researchers used an extract derived from just 1.2% cultivated pig cells in a plant-protein product and reported a 78.5% sensory similarity to pork, alongside an estimated 80% reduction in production costs compared with their cultivated-meat approach.

It is early research, not a supermarket-ready recipe. But the direction is revealing.

Perhaps cultivated meat does not need to replace every gram of meat to become useful. Its first commercially sensible role may instead be to supply the parts that are hardest to imitate, while cheaper ingredients do the rest.

There is something slightly less futuristic about that vision. Nobody spent the past decade raising billions for a heroic photograph of a burger containing a strategically useful amount of cultivated fat.

But commercially, it may make considerably more sense.

And that may be the more important lesson. Cultivated meat does not have to defeat the €5 chicken immediately to matter. It can compete first where conventional meat is expensive, where particular animal ingredients are difficult to replace, or where a relatively small amount of cultivated material dramatically improves another product.

The industry has already answered the scientific question that once sounded impossible: can meat be produced without raising the whole animal?

Yes.

The harder question is whether the economics can become ordinary enough for the technology to stop feeling extraordinary.