The Real Story: Addressing social media claims of lab-grown, 3D-printed meat in stores

SOUTH BEND, Ind.- You may have seen videos on social media claiming lab-grown meat, as well as 3D-printed salmon and meat products, are in grocery stores.

ABC57’s Jordan Tolbert asked a couple of experts for clarification on the products, which have been widely discussed on social media.

Elliot Swartz is the senior principal scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on making alternative proteins more widely available. Swartz discussed lab-grown—or 'cultivated meat ’:

“So, it's been about a decade since people have been at work at this. In the United States, there have been five products that have gone through the FDA and USDA regulatory process since 2022. So there have been five products that have cleared the safety evaluation that's conducted by the FDA,” said Swartz.

Swartz says some of those products were introduced for short periods of time but are no longer for sale, and another product has never been sold–even though it was approved.

“The only product right now, a cultivated meat product that's on the market in the United States, is a cultivated salmon product produced from a company called Wildtype, and that's currently available in five total restaurants across the entire country, so the short story here is that essentially the products are very new. They're not available in, you know, grocery stores today, and it will take quite a bit of time for that to happen,” said Swartz. “There's also videos going around like, you know, people think that you have the possibility of buying lab-grown meat in the supermarket, and you won't know it because there's no label on it. Well, that's just. I mean, it's not a possibility for that to even happen. I mean, the USDA federally reviews labels before they can actually reach consumers, and that has to be agreed upon. Like, there is no way to introduce a product without a clear label on the product.”

He says there isn’t official guidance yet on what labels would look like for cultivated meat products, but it’s something that's federally regulated.

As far as 3D-printed ‘meat,’ Forbes recently came out with an article addressing the products, saying an Israeli company launched 3D-printed protein products, but they are plant-based. These have rolled out at some supermarkets in the Northeast, according to Forbes.

Suzannah Gerber, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation, and a research professor at Tufts University. ABC57 asked Gerber about some of the 3D-printed meat claims circulating on social media. She says 3D-printed technology is not widely available in foods yet.

“Now a lot a lot of the images that you see online of people claiming that the conventional chicken they bought in the grocery store is 3D printed is actually just a broiler defect, for example, with chicken. So when broilers and industrial factory farms are raised under, you know, very fast conditions with diets that are dissimilar to their natural diet, you end up with this sort of texture that looks like they're sort of thready and separated. It's a very common broiler defect. It doesn't make it unsafe to eat, but it does like reduce the sort of pleasant texture,” said Gerber.

Gerber also warns of some of these doubt-inducing videos you may see online and what may be behind them.

“I would encourage people to sort of ask yourself: am I being presented with both sides of the story? Am I being presented with clear evidence, where I can make an informed decision for myself based on my own preferences, as opposed to what the speaker wants, what the speaker clearly thinks? If it's really heavily weighted, I would encourage people to sort of look into whether other people have said almost an exact same pattern of thing. Because if it's a pattern, chances are it's a campaign, and if it's a campaign, chances are it's being funded with some sort of obstructionist goal,” said Gerber.