SINGAPORE>> It was a remarkable moment in the annals of food, perhaps even humanity: A store in Singapore started selling lab-grown meat directly to the general public in May.

On a recent Saturday, visitors to the store, Huber’s Butchery, watched as a chef sautéed filets — 3% of which were generated from chicken cells and the rest from plant proteins — and served them in taco shells with avocado, pico de gallo and coriander.

It looked, cooked and tasted like chicken. Sascha Wenninger, 39, put three packs of the meat in his shopping basket. “I like eating meat, and if I can do it without animal cruelty, it’s ideal,” he said.

Others were not so enthused about meat cultivated in a lab. “Why eat something artificial when you can get fresh live chicken from nature?” said Philippe Ritoux, 58.

In recent years, Singapore has emerged as a hub for this utopian — or some might say — dystopian, future. The city-state, which is smaller than New York City, has spent tens of millions of dollars to study novel ways of producing food because it has very little land to farm and imports 90% of its food. It has looked at urban and vertical agriculture, approved insects for human consumption and given generous subsidies to cultivated meat startups.

Singapore became the first country to approve a lab-grown, or “cultivated meat,” product for commercial sale in 2020 (the United States followed two years later, but Florida banned it in May) and has since given the green light to other futuristic products, including a protein-rich powder synthesized from air and a concoction that does not require animal cells to grow meat in a lab.

“Before Singapore, cultivated meat was completely science fiction,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just, the company behind the cultivated meat being sold at Huber’s.

Consequently, any success Singapore has could have global significance.

But for many experts, lab-grown meat has failed to live up to its promise of replacing traditional meat and reining in climate change by reducing greenhouse gases that are emitted from livestock farming.

The price tag of the quarter-pound bags of cultivated meat at Huber’s — 7.20 Singapore dollars, about $5.30 — is a testament to how incredibly expensive it is to produce it.

“There are enormous scaling challenges between where we are and where we need to get to, and those scaling challenges are not guaranteed to be solved,” Tetrick said.

Partly because of this, new funding for lab-grown meat startups is drying up.

Before it began retail sales, cultivated meat in Singapore was available only in the restaurant within Huber’s. Starting in January 2023, Huber’s sold a sandwich with fries and mixed greens and a pasta dish with spring vegetable orecchiette. Both dishes were priced at 18.50 Singapore dollars ($14) and heavily subsidized by Eat Just’s subsidiary, Good Meat.

Last October, I tried the sandwich with fries, which was delicious but hard to fully assess because the chicken came in tiny shreds and was coated generously with a mustard dressing.

The chicken served at Huber’s begins with a small sample of cells. These are put into temperature-controlled stainless steel vessels known as bioreactors at a factory run by a local firm, Esco Aster. They are fed with a mixture of amino acids, fats, vitamins and minerals to mirror the nutrients that a chicken eats on the outside. Once a significant number of cells is cultivated, they are harvested and processed with plant proteins at Singapore’s Food Tech Innovation Center.

Andre Huber, executive director of Huber’s, said he wasn’t a fan of Good Meat’s initial offering, a chicken nugget. But 18 months later, in September 2022, when he tried the brand’s chicken breast, he found that the texture was “maybe 80 to 90% as close to the real thing.”

He added: “And the taste was spot on. I mean, it just tasted like chicken, entirely like the real thing.”

But while Huber has been selling the cultivated meat, he hasn’t in recent months been serving it because Good Meat has stopped supplying it to his kitchen. The company said this is part of its normal cycle in Singapore where it has always “produced and paused” production. Good Meat, which is embroiled in a legal dispute with a supplier, has yet to follow up on plans to open Asia’s largest cultivated meat facility last year in Singapore.

Singapore remains an enticing market for other companies.

Didier Toubia is the co-founder of Aleph Farms, which makes cultivated steaks in Israel. He said the company chose to make beef because among all the different types of livestock farming, cattle is the most intensive in terms of land and water use, and its impact on the climate. At the same time, hotter temperatures in some areas are reducing cows’ ability to reproduce.

In January, Aleph Farms — which is based in the city of Rehovot — obtained approval from Israel to sell its thin-cut steaks. That same month, a rabbi certified the meats as kosher. Time magazine described it as tasting like steak, but “without the guilt.” Aleph Farms said it is also close to getting clearance to sell its cultivated meat in Singapore.

The world, Toubia said, needs “Plan Bs.”

Part of the solution, he said, could come from meat grown from cells, which would limit the effect of cattle farming on land and water resources, and the climate. Aleph Farms is exploring the possibility of building factories in Singapore and Thailand.

In Singapore, there is perpetual anxiety about securing its future. Water used to dominate the country’s concerns; now it is food. A recent jolt came during the pandemic, when Malaysia, one of Singapore’s biggest food sources, banned the export of chickens to the city-state.

For this reason, the Singapore government is focused on improving the viability of the production of alternative proteins. In a call for research grants, the Singapore Food Agency said its “aspirational” target is to cut the production costs of cultivated meat from $120 a kilogram to between $6 and $17 per kilogram by the end of the decade.

Some in the cultivated meat business believe that chicken could sell for $30 a kilogram by that period. Xiangliang Lin, CEO of Esco Aster, is one of them.

But for that to happen, he said, there needs to be a wide-ranging, public-private partnership akin to Gavi, the organization that made vaccines cheap because it bought them in bulk for developing countries.

Esco Aster, the contract manufacturer for cultivated meat, has received “very generous grants” from the Singapore government, said Dominic Chen, a company executive. Rent, he added, “is very, very cheap, essentially free.”

Meatable, a Dutch company that hopes to sell products such as sausages, dumplings and pulled pork, plans to invest about $88 million in Singapore. Its co-founder, Daan Luining, said Meatable can now grow pork in four days. It typically takes eight months to rear a pig.

Luining was one of the researchers who produced a hamburger in a laboratory in 2013 at a cost of $325,000. The reviews were not kind: It was dry and lacking in flavor, with one verdict comparing the taste to “an animal-protein cake.”

Luining said he could not have imagined the current evolution 10 years ago. He added that people used to ask him whether his endeavor even made sense, but now many companies all over the world are using different technologies to bring products on the market. “It really has come far,” he said.