In a laboratory in the heart of Beijing, a small team of scientists are just getting started on what they hope will be a radical leap-forward in how the world makes its meat.
They are backed by the Chinese government with an edict all the way from the top, asked to spend their days pouring cell cultures through bioreactors and 3D printers in search of modern food’s holy grail: a lab-grown meat just as delicious and no more expensive than the real thing.
They are of course not the first to try engineering an alternative protein that can enthral shoppers. But never before has an attempt had the potential for such immense resources to swing in behind.
For President Xi Jinping and the Chinese government, this is a question of national security. As the world’s second most populous nation, China consumes almost a third of the world’s meat and is the world’s largest importer of meat and dairy. Food security is a very real concern.
A new raft of policies is therefore intended to address the country’s shortfall and bring more security. Last year, a key policy document listed “building a diversified food supply system,” as a key goal, calling for efforts “to cultivate and develop biological agriculture and explore novel food resources.”
China has shown before it has the firepower to drive global shifts towards green technologies, most notably in solar power and electric vehicles which, just like lab-grown meat, had no real public clamour before China created the demand through pumping out desirable and affordable alternatives.
“One cannot overstate the significance of Asia’s largest economy putting cultivated meat and other novel ingredients at the centre of its national food strategy,” says Mirte Gosker, CEO of the Good Food Institute APAC, an alternative protein think tank.
Is China therefore set to transform the alternative protein market not just domestically, but around the world?
China’s potential to lead in biotech and cultivated meat
It’s still early days in China’s food system transformation but predictions for its long-term potential are already coming thick and fast. Most notably, a new report in April raised the possibility that by 2050 “a new equilibrium emerges, with China leading a new bio-based industry.”
According to this prediction, cultivated meat could eventually make up around half of China’s domestic protein consumption as the country blooms into “the world’s leading supplier of a defining 21st century technology.”
“The consequences of this transition will be felt across the global food system,” says Systemiq, a systems change company and the report’s authors, pointing out it could lower the cost of fermentation infrastructure for everyone while simultaneously introducing new competition into established markets.
It would be a dramatic overhaul of the existing food system. But production only solves the supply side of the equation. Creating demand is an entirely different conundrum and as China’s chief concern is food security, the first test will be whether Chinese consumers are willing to eat it.
There is clearly an interest. Last year, the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture ran a survey in four major Chinese cities finding that while just 10% of Chinese consumers were aware of “cell-cultured foods”, 77% said they would be willing to try it.
But trying it is one thing, eating it over and over is quite another. While cultivated meat is not yet commercially available in China, the failure of other plant-based proteins elsewhere suggests the possibilities for China’s cultivated meat sector might not be quite as rosy as some believe.
What will it take for western alt protein to survive in China?
Over the last seven years, a number of western brands have sought to bring their alternative protein products to China yet almost all have now pulled out. Beyond Meat and Impossible have come and gone, while Oatly is now also reported to be mulling a sale of its Chinese business after several years of struggle.
The problem with Western brands is they fail to tailor their products to local cuisines, says Cathy Gu, a China and Asia expansion specialist at management consultancy Tractus.
In many cases, they launch burgers and sausages for sale in restaurants and takeaways rather than products which would naturally fit into typical Chinese home cooking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they therefore failed to hold the public’s attention for long.
“We have a lot of interest because they’re quite new,” Gu says. “But after we taste it, the interest has faded away and we go back to our normal foods. We’re not interested anymore.”
This is seemingly backed up in two recent surveys. The first, by Kantar, found 41% of Asian consumers have tried plant‑based proteins, higher than global averages.
However, PwC found there are still considerably more Asian Pacific consumers intending to increase their consumption of red meat, poultry, and seafood than decrease.
The animal protein conundrum
This rejection is not just a problem for American and European companies. Asian start-ups have also sought to capitalise on an accelerating demand for protein from urbanisation, population growth and higher incomes, yet have ultimately fared little better.
Even in Singapore, which just a few years ago was lauded as the world’s centre of the cultivated meat industry, companies are closing up.
Cultivated fish firm Avant Proteins wound up local operations in February; Shiok Meats merged with Umami Bioworks in 2024 with Shiok’s CEO leaving the company; and Eat Just “paused” cultivated meat production in Singapore in 2024 but its website shows no sign of a return.
“It’s a graveyard of companies out there,” says James Meisenheimer, an agri-foods consultant at Tractus. “If you look at the number of pure-play plant-based companies that have declared bankruptcy in China, in Thailand, in Malaysia, in Singapore, the numbers are staggering.”
Amid clear difficulties in commercialising the technology and flaky consumer demand, even the once-encouraging Singapore is changing tact, dropping alternative proteins from its national food strategy and becoming more stringent on regulatory approvals for new start-ups.
Environment minister Grace Fu cited “higher production costs and weaker-than-expected consumer acceptance globally,” and said the country would now focus on R&D to make the sector “more competitive and mainstream”.
Alt meat faces extra challenges - and investors know it
While Meisenheimer believes there is still an opportunity for dairy-free beverages in Asia, noting Australia is successfully selling plant-based drinks into this market, he is far less optimistic about the future of plant-based meat on the continent.
“There’s a more compelling narrative in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, where you have higher disposable income and customers embodying more sustainability through a lot of their consumer behaviour,” he explains. “In Asia, that’s really nascent.”
If China is to bridge this gap, it will therefore need to significantly boost its current investment. While it has put aside $1bn to invest in new biotechnologies, this is largely earmarked for other priority industries like pharmaceuticals and nanotechnology meaning it is unclear how much will actually be channelled into alternative proteins. The new lab in Beijing received about $11m.
Around the world, the sector needs public investment more acutely than ever as private funding dries up. Yet so far, at least, there is little sign governments are willing to pick up the slack.
In line with their private counterparts, public investment shot up at the start of the pandemic, going from $36m in 2019 to $165m in 2020, analysis of the Good Food Institute’s investment tracker shows.
Governments doubled down again in 2022 to bring total investments that year close to $600m but after a few steady years, interest is now waning with the total figure falling to less than $500m in 2025.
That’s a long way short of the estimated $10bn needed each year from governments if the alternative protein market is to reach maturity, as predicted by a UK government funded study in 2021. Based on those 2025 figures at least, governments are currently at less than 5% of the necessary benchmark.
That’s not to say government intervention is not making an impact. South Korea has now overtaken Singapore as Asia-Pacific’s largest startup and manufacturing epicentre for alternative proteins, according to the Good Food Institute, helped by government initiatives to support plant-based and cultivated foods.
This included a $21m investment in research for plant-based and cultivated seafood technologies from the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, and a Food Tech Research Support Center dedicated to plant-based proteins planned to open next year.
And if China does end up opting to give the sector it’s full backing, it would likely be on an entirely different to anything most other Asian nations are capable of providing.
“What’s fascinating about the China case is that some people poo-poo it based on historical uses of the same technology,” says Sam Perkins, CEO of Cellular Agriculture Australia.
“But there’s some pretty smart people in China who clearly think with enough investment and enough scale, the COGs [cost of goods sold] curve is going to drop sufficiently where that becomes the best, cheapest way of producing large amounts of protein.”
Like many of its fallen predecessors though, it seems China’s greatest challenge may not be producing cheaper proteins but overcoming the personal, cultural, historical factors that keep people tied to the foods they know and love.
China may have shown they are willing to switch to solar power or electric vehicles when a cheaper alternative comes along, but the motivations to keep eating meat could be much trickier to shift.
