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 was less a product than a proof of concept: evidence that animal cells could be turned into something recognisably meat without first raising an entire animal.

A little over a decade later, that scientific question looks considerably less outrageous. Cultivated meat has passed regulatory safety processes in markets including Singapore, the United States, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. Chicken, quail, salmon, pork fat and other cultivated products have moved beyond laboratory demonstrations, even if most remain far from ordinary supermarket shelves.

So the question has changed.

It is no longer simply whether we can grow meat.

It is whether cultivated meat can become cheap, scalable and ordinary enough to compete with conventional meat as everyday food.

And chicken is a particularly unforgiving benchmark.

The first cultivated burger happened to be beef, but beef is not the hardest meat to compete with economically. Industrial chicken is. Poultry has spent decades being optimised through breeding, feed, processing, logistics and enormous supply chains. In week 19 of 2026, the European Commission's average EU broiler price was €294.80 per 100 kilograms of carcass weight, just under €3 per kilogram at that stage of the supply chain. EU poultry production reached roughly 14.2 million tonnes in 2025.

The €5 chicken in the headline is therefore not really about five euros. It represents something much harder to disrupt: a mature food system that has become extremely good at producing enormous quantities of inexpensive protein.

Cultivated meat does not merely need to work.

It needs to work millions of times, cheaply.

And that is where the audit gets harder.

There is genuine evidence that the cost curve can move dramatically. A 2024 study in Nature Food demonstrated continuous production of cultivated chicken cells using an animal-component-free medium costing $0.63 per litre. The researchers maintained high-density cell production for more than 20 days and used the experimental results to model a theoretical 50,000-litre production facility. Under those assumptions, they estimated cultivated chicken production could reach $6.20 per pound, which they placed within the range of organic chicken.

Compared with a €250,000 burger, that is extraordinary progress.

But the distinction between what was demonstrated and what was modelled matters.

The researchers demonstrated the cell culture process. They did not operate a mature 50,000-litre cultivated-chicken factory producing meat at that price. The industrial economics came from a model built around how the process might behave at much larger scale. Several authors were affiliated with Believer Meats, which also helped fund the research. That does not invalidate the work, but it makes independent validation at commercial scale particularly important.

And when researchers look across the broader body of economic modelling, the picture becomes less comfortable.

A separate 2024 Nature Food review examined cultivated-meat techno-economic studies and concluded that, under the current technological paradigm, cultivated meat is unlikely to compete directly with conventional meat. Reaching parity would require progress in areas including cheaper media ingredients, more appropriate bioreactor designs, better cell lines and supply chains that do not yet exist at the required scale.

That difference is crucial.

One study asks whether a technically plausible route to lower cost exists.

The broader evidence asks whether the industry can actually build that route.

At the moment, those are not the same thing.

The difficulty starts with the cells themselves. Unlike a chicken, which turns relatively cheap feed into muscle through its own biology, cultivated meat production has to recreate parts of that biological environment inside a controlled industrial system. Cells require sugars, amino acids, vitamins, proteins, growth factors and other ingredients in the liquid that surrounds them.

Those ingredients have historically been expensive because cell culture developed largely for biomedical applications, where producing small amounts of a high-value pharmaceutical product can justify costs that would be absurd in food manufacturing.

A steak cannot carry pharmaceutical margins.

Neither can a chicken nugget.

Researchers are making significant progress here. Serum-free and animal-free media are increasingly viable, and the $0.63-per-litre medium demonstrated in the Nature Food study represents exactly the kind of cost reduction the industry needs. But a 2024 review of serum-free media still estimated that growth media contribute at least half of the variable operating costs in cultivated-meat production.

Then there is the physical production system.

Growing a small quantity of cells in a laboratory vessel is one thing. Growing huge quantities reliably inside industrial bioreactors is another.

The cells need oxygen and nutrients. Waste has to be removed. Temperature and acidity need to remain controlled. Contamination can ruin a batch. Cell density has to remain high enough for the economics to work. And the equipment itself needs to become more appropriate for food manufacturing rather than simply borrowing expensive systems from pharmaceutical biotechnology.

There has been real movement. The Good Food Institute's 2026 industry assessment reports that Australia's Vow has operated cultivated-meat production at a 20,000-litre scale, currently among the largest demonstrated scales in the sector. But the same assessment identifies equipment costs, facility costs, media preparation, sterilisation, waste handling and operational reliability as areas where the industry still lacks enough real-world commercial data.

That is the gap between scale existing and scale becoming economical.

A 20,000-litre bioreactor is a serious engineering achievement.

It is not yet a poultry industry.

And this is why the economics of cultivated meat cannot be separated from scalability. Usually we talk about them as two different questions: can you make enough, and can you make it cheaply enough?

Here, they are almost the same problem.

Costs fall only if cells can be grown at very high densities, in large volumes, using cheap inputs, with reliable production and high equipment utilisation. But increasing scale can introduce new engineering problems that were less visible in the laboratory.

The industry therefore needs several things to improve at once.

Cheaper media alone is not enough if cell density remains too low.

Bigger bioreactors are not enough if contamination makes batches unreliable.

Efficient cell lines are not enough if the equipment costs too much.

And even a technically efficient factory is not enough if its finished product still costs several times more than the chicken sitting next to it.

That last part matters because consumers do not appear particularly interested in financing the industry's scale-up through premium pricing.

A 2025 Euroconsumers study across Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal found that 61% of respondents believed cultivated meat would only succeed if it were affordable to everyone. Only 15% said they would buy it if it cost more than conventional meat, while 47% actually expected cultivated meat to be cheaper. Taste mattered too, with 48% saying they would only buy it if the taste and structure matched traditionally produced meat.

Curiosity might persuade someone to buy cultivated chicken once.

Price and taste decide whether it becomes dinner.

Regulatory approvals are therefore important, but they should not be confused with adoption. Passing a safety assessment establishes that a product can enter a market. It does not establish that consumers will buy enough of it to support industrial-scale production.

That distinction is already visible. The cultivated-meat industry has accumulated a growing list of regulatory clearances, but sustained commercial availability remains limited. The Good Food Institute reported that only three companies consistently sustained sales during 2025, despite a wider group having completed safety evaluations or received regulatory clearance.

Europe presents another layer of uncertainty. Cell-cultured meat is regulated as a novel food in the EU and applications are under assessment, but no cultivated meat for human consumption has yet been authorised for sale across the bloc. Elsewhere, some governments have moved in the opposite direction and introduced restrictions or bans.

So even if the production economics improve, cultivated meat still has to navigate regulation, politics, public perception and an unusually high expectation that the new product should cost no more than the old one.

And there is another assumption worth examining.

If cultivated meat eventually reaches price parity with conventional chicken, will it necessarily deliver the wider benefits used to justify all this effort?

The answer is more complicated than the industry's earliest sustainability narratives suggested.

Cultivated meat has an obvious potential animal-welfare advantage because producing the meat does not require raising and slaughtering animals at anything approaching today's scale.

Its potential land-use advantage is also substantial because cells do not require the enormous agricultural footprint associated with growing feed and maintaining livestock.

Climate impact is less straightforward.

A prospective life-cycle assessment found that cultivated meat could use substantially less agricultural land than conventional meat and, when powered with renewable energy, could achieve a carbon footprint comparable with ambitious chicken-production benchmarks. But cultivated meat is energy intensive, particularly because bioreactors need tightly controlled conditions and because producing culture-medium ingredients can consume considerable energy.

A 2026 systematic review reached a similarly conditional conclusion. Cultivated meat showed strong potential to reduce land and water requirements, but energy demand was often higher than poultry or pork unless low-carbon or renewable electricity was assumed. Culture media also remained an important environmental hotspot.

That means chicken is difficult to beat twice.

First economically.

Then environmentally.

The sustainability case against beef can be relatively strong because cattle occupy large amounts of land and produce significant methane emissions. Conventional chicken is already much more resource-efficient. Cultivated chicken therefore has to become a highly efficient industrial process before its environmental advantage becomes equally obvious.

None of this means the technology has failed.

It may mean we have been asking it to succeed in the wrong way.

The industry's most visible ambition has often resembled a one-for-one substitution: grow the burger, steak or chicken breast directly from cells, make it indistinguishable from conventional meat, then eventually make it just as cheap.

But what if cultivated meat becomes economically useful before fully cultivated meat becomes cheap?

A 2025 study offers an intriguing example. Researchers produced meat-like aroma compounds from cultivated pig cells, then incorporated an extract derived from just 1.2% cultivated cells into a predominantly plant-protein product. Their sensory testing reported 78.5% similarity to pork while their model estimated an 80% reduction in production costs compared with their fully cultivated approach.

That is early research, not a supermarket-ready formula.

But the logic matters.

If growing animal cells remains expensive, perhaps the first commercially sensible use is not to grow every gram of the final product from cells.

Plant proteins can provide bulk and structure. Cultivated cells or fats can provide some of the properties that alternatives struggle to reproduce, such as animal fat, flavour or particular sensory characteristics.

There are signs that the industry is already exploring that direction. In 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration completed its consultation on Mission Barns' cultivated pork fat cells, which are intended to be incorporated into finished food products rather than necessarily replacing the entire product with cultivated biomass.

Commercially, that may make more sense than trying to defeat commodity chicken at its own game immediately.

And it changes what success might look like.

Cultivated meat does not need to replace every kilogram of conventional meat before it becomes useful. It could first enter areas where conventional ingredients are more expensive, where animal fat or flavour adds disproportionate value, or where a relatively small amount of cultivated material meaningfully improves a cheaper product.

That future is less dramatic than the image that launched the industry.

Nobody spent the past decade talking about a revolution built around putting a strategically useful percentage of cultivated fat into a hybrid meatball.

But innovation does not have to arrive in its most ambitious form to matter.

The industry has already crossed the threshold that looked impossible in 2013.

Animal cells can become food.

The next threshold is much more ordinary and arguably much harder.

Can they become a commodity?

Because a €250,000 burger only had to work once.

A €5 chicken has to work millions of times, every day.

And that is where extraordinary science meets very ordinary economics.