Top stories in Cultivated Meat – June 2026

Summer 2026 is here, and while most of us are dreaming of barbecues and beach trips, the cultivated meat industry is still busy trying to figure out how to make lab-grown steaks cheaper than a pack of hot dogs.

• Consumer acceptance of the cultured meat industry depends on the use of terms like “cultured” instead of “lab-grown” and on explaining the concept in layman’s terms without scientific jargon.
• The industry landscape is undergoing restructuring with UPSIDE Foods’ $50 million bid to acquire Believer Meats’ assets, layoffs at Aleph Farms, and the opening of a cultured meat farm in the Netherlands.
• New innovations aim to reduce production costs, notably Deco Labs, which uses rapeseed oil byproducts to replace expensive culture media.
• Investment in the sector has fallen since 2021, prompting players to focus on scaling up to industrial levels to reduce the environmental footprint of protein consumption.
• Japan has published its first safety guidelines for cultured meat to regulate cell sourcing and manufacturing controls.
• Research is advancing on texture through the use of fava bean protein isolate to mimic the muscle fibers of conventional meat.
• Other organic alternatives are making progress, such as Innovafeed, which raised 51 million euros for insect proteins, and New Dawn Bio, which raised 2.1 million euros for cultured wood.

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