| Year |
Event
|
| 1912 |
French biologist Alexis Carrel keeps a piece of chick heart muscle alive in a Petri dish, demonstrating the possibility of keeping muscle tissue alive outside of the body.[2]
|
| 1930 |
Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead predicts that "It will no longer be necessary to go to the extravagant length of rearing a bullock in order to eat its steak. From one 'parent' steak of choice tenderness it will be possible to grow as large and as juicy a steak as can be desired."[3]
|
| 1932 |
Winston Churchill writes "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."[3]
|
| Early 1950s |
Willem van Eelen recognizes the possibility of generating meat from tissue culture.[2]
|
| 1971 |
Russell Ross achieves the in vitro cultivation of muscular fibers.[4]
|
| 1995 |
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the use of commercial in-vitro meat production.[5]
|
| 1999 |
Willem van Eelen secures the first patent for cultured meat.[2]
|
| 2001 |
NASA begins in vitro meat experiments, producing cultured turkey meat.[6][7]
|
| 2002 |
Researchers culture muscle tissue of the common goldfish in Petri dishes. The meat was judged by a test-panel to be acceptable as food.[2]
|
| 2003 |
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture and Art Project and Harvard Medical School produce an edible steak from frog stem cells.[8]
|
| 2004 |
Jason Matheny founds New Harvest, the first non-profit to work for the development of cultured meat.[3]
|
| 2005 |
Dutch government agency SenterNovem begins funding cultured meat research.[9]
|
| 2005 |
The first peer-reviewed journal article on lab-grown meat appears in Tissue Engineering.[10]
|
| 2008 |
The In Vitro Meat Consortium holds the first international conference on the production of in vitro meat.[11]
|
| 2008 |
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offers a $1 million prize to the first group to make a commercially viable lab-grown chicken by 2012.[5]
|
| 2011 |
The company Modern Meadow, aimed at producing cultured leather and meat, is founded.[12]
|
| 2013 |
The first cultured hamburger, developed by Dutch researcher Mark Post's lab, is taste-tested by Hanni Rützler.[13]
|
| 2014 |
Muufri and The EVERY Company, companies aimed at producing cultured dairy and eggs, respectively, are founded with the assistance of New Harvest.[14][15]
|
| 2014 |
Real Vegan Cheese, a startup aimed at creating cultured cheese, is founded.[16]
|
| 2014 |
Modern Meadow presents "steak chips", discs of lab-grown meat that could be produced at relatively low cost.[12]
|
| 2015 |
The Modern Agriculture Foundation, which focuses on developing cultured chicken meat (as chickens make up the large majority of land animals killed for food[17]), is founded in Israel.[18]
|
| 2015 |
According to Mark Post's lab, the cost of producing a cultured hamburger patty drops from $325,000 in 2013 to less than $12.[19]
|
| 2016 |
New Crop Capital, a private venture capital fund investing in alternatives to animal agriculture - including cellular agriculture - is founded. Its $25 million portfolio includes cultured meat company Memphis Meats and cultured collagen company Gelzen, along with Lighter, a software platform designed to facilitate plant-based eating, a plant-based meal delivery service called Purple Carrot, a dairy alternative Lyrical Foods, the New Zealand plant-based meat company Sunfed, and alternative cheese company Miyoko’s Kitchen.[20]
|
| 2016 |
The Good Food Institute, an organization devoted to promoting alternatives to animal food products - including cellular agriculture - is founded.[21]
|
| 2016 |
Memphis Meats announces the creation of the first cultured meatball.[22]
|
| 2016 |
New Harvest hosted New Harvest 2016: Experience Cellular Agriculture, the first-ever global cellular agriculture conference.[23]
|
| 2018 |
Paul Shapiro's book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, which chronicles the entrepreneurs, scientists and investors seeking to create the world's first slaughter-free meat.[24] The book was placed on The Washington Post's bestseller list.[25]
|
| 2019
|
Perfect Day (formerly Muufri) sells 1000 3-pint bundles of ice cream made with non-animal whey protein.[26]
|
| 2020 |
Memphis Meats received a US$161 million investment in its Series B, which is more than everything that had been invested in the industry so far which was US$155 million.[27]
|
| 2021
|
Tufts University is awarded US$10 million by the USDA to establish the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture.[28]
|
