{"id":872192,"date":"2025-09-11T21:11:53","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/11\/texas-banned-lab-grown-meat-whats-next-for-the-industry\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T21:11:53","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:11:53","slug":"texas-banned-lab-grown-meat-whats-next-for-the-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/11\/texas-banned-lab-grown-meat-whats-next-for-the-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas banned lab-grown meat. What\u2019s next for the industry?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last week, a legal battle over lab-grown meat kicked off in Texas. On September 1, a two-year ban on the technology went into effect across the state; the following day, two companies filed a lawsuit against state officials.<\/p>\n

The two companies, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods, are part of a growing industry that aims to bring new types of food to people\u2019s plates. These products, often called cultivated meat by the industry, take live animal cells and grow them in the lab to make food products without the need to slaughter animals.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Texas joins six other US states and the country of Italy in banning these products. These legal challenges are adding barriers to an industry that\u2019s still in its infancy and already faces plenty of challenges before it can reach consumers in a meaningful way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The agriculture sector makes up a hefty chunk of global greenhouse-gas emissions, with livestock alone accounting for somewhere between 10% and 20% of climate pollution<\/a>. Alternative meat products, including those grown in a lab, could help cut the greenhouse gases from agriculture.<\/p>\n

The industry is still in its early days, though. In the US, just a handful of companies can legally sell products including cultivated chicken, pork fat, and salmon. Australia, Singapore, and Israel also allow a few companies to sell within their borders.<\/p>\n

Upside Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, was one of the first to receive the legal go-ahead to sell its products in the US, in 2022<\/a>. Wildtype Foods, one of the latest additions to the US market, was able to start selling its cultivated salmon in June.<\/p>\n

Upside, Wildtype, and other cultivated-meat companies are still working to scale up production. Products are generally available at pop-up events or on special menus at high-end restaurants. (I visited San Francisco to try Upside\u2019s cultivated chicken at a Michelin-starred restaurant a few years ago.)<\/p>\n

Until recently, the only place you could reliably find lab-grown meat in Texas was a sushi restaurant in Austin. Otoko featured Wildtype\u2019s cultivated salmon on a special tasting menu starting in July. (The chef told local publication Culture Map Austin<\/a> that the cultivated fish tastes like wild salmon, and it was included in a dish with grilled yellowtail to showcase it side-by-side with another type of fish.)<\/p>\n

The as-yet-limited reach of lab-grown meat didn\u2019t stop state officials from moving to ban the technology, effective from now until September 2027.<\/p>\n

The office of state senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, whose president, Carl Ray Polk Jr., testified in support of the bill in a March committee hearing.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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In an interview with the Texas Tribune<\/em><\/a>, Polk said the two-year moratorium would help the industry put checks and balances in place before the products could be sold. He also expressed concern about how clearly cultivated-meat companies will be labeling their products.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe purpose of these bans is to try to kill the cultivated-meat industry before it gets off the ground,\u201d said Myra Pasek, general counsel of Upside Foods, via email. The company is working to scale up its manufacturing and get the product on the market, she says, \u201cbut that can’t happen if we\u2019re not allowed to compete in the marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others in the industry have similar worries. \u201cMoratoriums on sale like this not only deny Texans new choices and economic growth, but they also send chilling signals to researchers and entrepreneurs across the country,\u201d said Pepin Andrew Tuma, the vice president of policy and government relations for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on alternative proteins, in a statement. (The group isn\u2019t involved in the lawsuit.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

One day after the moratorium took effect on September 1, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods filed a lawsuit challenging the ban, naming Jennifer Shuford, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, among other state officials.<\/p>\n

A lawsuit wasn\u2019t necessarily part of the scale-up plan. \u201cThis was really a last resort for us,\u201d says Justin Kolbeck, cofounder and CEO of Wildtype.<\/p>\n

Growing cells to make meat in the lab isn\u2019t easy\u2014some companies have spent a decade or more trying to make significant amounts of a product that people want to eat. These legal battles certainly aren\u2019t going to help.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article is from The Spark, <\/em>MIT Technology Review\u2019s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, <\/em>sign up here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Casey Crownhart<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, a legal battle over lab-grown meat kicked off in Texas. On September 1, a two-year ban on the technology went into effect across the state; the following day, two companies filed a lawsuit against state officials. The two companies, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods, are part of a growing industry that aims to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":872193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1737,46,836],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-872192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-banned","8":"category-technology","9":"category-texas"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}