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Last week the industry hit another milestone as an Israeli company broke ground on what it says will be the biggest cultured meat plant in the world.

The company was founded under the name Future Meat Technologies in 2018, but rebranded to Believer Meats last month. In 2021 they opened a facility to produce lab-grown meat at scale in Israel, and were aiming to secure FDA approval and start offering their products in US restaurants by the end of this year. That doesn’t seem to have happened, as the first FDA approval went to competitor Upside Foods.

But true to its name, Believer Meats hasn’t been deterred by this slower-than-anticipated series of events. Last week the company started construction of a 200,000-square-foot factory in Wilson, North Carolina, about 45 miles due east of Raleigh. In a press release the company stated, somewhat perplexingly, that it chose this location partly because of its “success in integrating technology-driven solutions to improve the lives of residents.”
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Given the way cultured meat is made, there’s no reason why the above list can’t expand even more. Cells are extracted from an animal’s tissue (in a process that doesn’t harm the animal at all) and mixed with a cocktail of nutrients, oxygen, and moisture. Inside large bioreactors, the mixture is kept at the same temperature cells would be at in an animal’s body. The cells divide, multiply, and mature, with any waste products being removed to keep the environment pure.

You can just as easily take cells from a pig as from a cow, chicken, turkey, lamb, or fish (etc, etc). But growing the cells is the (relatively) easy part; the bioreactors don’t pop out ready-to-eat chicken breasts or racks of lamb. Replicating meat’s structure—that is, the tendons, muscle, fat, bone, and connective tissue that comes with it—is a complex process, and crucial to giving whole cuts of meat their distinctive texture and flavor. After the cells are “harvested” from the bioreactors they grew in, they need to be refined and shaped into a final product, which could involve extrusion cooking, molding, and even 3D printing