Chinese government pushing for development of Cell-based Meat Category

Still at its infancy stage, China’s cell-based meat category needs to do a lot of catching up as the country hopes to meet its growing domestic consumption of meat products.
The issue was raised by Sun Baoguo, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) during China’s massive high-level plenary meeting between the CPPCC and National People’ Congress (NPC), the organisations responsible for making national-level decisions in the country.
Sun said that China should implement policies to better prepare in this area as many other countries such as the US, Japan, Israel and the EU have already been focusing on this category for some time. Cell-based meat is one of the major solutions for a stable, clean and sustainable supply of proteins for the country’s huge 1.4 billion population.
Sun proposed more investments in cultured meat R&D, particularly in areas such as acquiring efficient seed cells, proliferation and differentiation, culturing medium, equipment and more. At the same time, China needs to review and set its existing regulations and standards relating to this new category.
In addition, Chinese consumers need to be educated on the sciences behind cultured cell-based meat in order to get greater consumer acceptance.
Not much progress was made in this category in China, however, in 2017 the Nanjing Agricultural University reported that it had successfully produced 5g of pork from muscle stem cells at its laboratory. In the same year, China also signed a US$300 million deal to import laboratory-cultured meat from Israel.