For Chicago residents who live in food deserts, the future of access to fresh, affordable meat has become increasingly uncertain. Could meat grown in a lab help expand access in Chicago’s food deserts?
Surging grocery prices—which noticeably spiked during the pandemic—continue to trend upwards in 2026. Since 2019, the average cost of food items in the U.S. has increased more than 25 percent. Protein prices—including staples like beef and pork—have seen some of the biggest hikes, with prices climbing by 35 percent during this period.
In Chicago communities classified as food deserts—areas where affordable, healthy food is largely unavailable—such as Englewood and Austin, rising prices are further narrowing the range of available choices.
Along with federal SNAP benefit cuts, surging grocery prices have forced families to rely more heavily on processed foods or go without consistent sources of fresh protein.
[fold out explainer] Why are prices rising?
The cost of beef surged earlier this year following federal trade policies on imported agricultural products. Even as those tariffs were rolled back, persistent drought-induced cattle herd lows continued to drive high production costs across the meat industry.
According to reporting on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the domestic cattle inventory has contracted to its lowest point in more than 70 years, a structural shortage that has significantly heightened the nation’s reliance on foreign meat imports. As producers passed these combined costs on, the impact remained most acute in low-income and low-access neighborhoods.
Lab-grown protein: a potential solution
Researchers and companies in the cultivated meat field are exploring an alternative approach to meat production: one that replaces the farm with the lab.
Inside a facility in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, scientists at Clever Carnivore, a biotechnology company founded in 2021, are using stem cell technology to cultivate lab-grown meat products. Instead of raising livestock, the company cultivates cells in bioreactors — controlled vessels that regulate temperature, oxygen and nutrients.
Paul Burridge, co-founder of Clever Carnivore and a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, compared the cell-growing system to a fermenter in a brewery. By taking a one-time sample from a piece of meat, scientists can grow cells “indefinitely,” explained Burridge.
“So from just that one sample of meat—which is a USDA approved piece of meat—we have a methodology to keep growing as many cells as we possibly can,” Burridge said.
In these systems, animal cells receive biochemical signals that allow them to multiply and develop into tissue. Over time, the cells form the building blocks of meat, which can then be processed into familiar products.
Cultivated meat and “moving beyond the novelty”
Burridge said the company’s current focus is on products like bratwurst, designed to demonstrate that cultivated meat can move beyond novelty and compete with conventional meat on both taste and price.
“We have a product, it looks just like a normal sausage,” Burridge said. “Looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same, cooks in the same way, and most importantly, costs the same.”
That claim — cost parity with conventional meat — sits at the center of the technology’s potential impact. If cultivated meat remains expensive, it is unlikely to change food access in neighborhoods where affordability already constrains choice. If it can be produced cheaply at scale, it could represent a new source of protein less dependent on the supply chains that drove recent price increases.
Scaling challenges
The underlying biology of cultivated meat is well studied, but translating that science into large-scale production remains difficult.
The process relies on myogenesis, a form of muscle cell development in which precursor cells proliferate, align and fuse into fibers that give meat its structure.
Paul Mozdziak, a professor of poultry science at North Carolina State University, said controlling this process is essential not only for producing sufficient quantities of cells, but also for determining the texture and quality of the final product.
“The challenge with bioreactors is, if you get something to work at a three-liter scale, you get to 30 liters, it can be entirely different,” Mozdziak said. “When you go from reactor volume to reactor volume, biology really drives what happens. Because it works in one scale doesn’t mean it’s going to work as well in another. If you make a mistake, you can sink a company really fast.”
For processed products like sausages or hot dogs, the technical goal is relatively straightforward: produce enough cells expressing the right proteins, such as actin and myosin, to replicate the characteristics of ground meat.
More complex cuts, however, present additional challenges. As tissue becomes thicker, cells must be arranged in ways that allow nutrients to reach the interior while waste products are removed. Without sufficient diffusion, cells at the center of the tissue cannot survive.
“If you’re not getting the medium to the center of that, you’re not going to take the waste products away, then the cells are going to die,” Mozdziak explained.
High production costs and workarounds
Traditional cell culture relies on expensive inputs, particularly fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich supplement that can cost hundreds of dollars per liter. Such costs make large-scale production impractical without significant changes to the growth process.
Burridge said Clever Carnivore has focused on replacing these inputs with a chemically engineered growth medium that costs approximately seven cents per liter. The company argues that reducing the cost of this key input is critical to making cultivated meat economically viable.
“The main input into the cost of cultivated meat is ultimately the cost of the medium,” Burridge said. “So that’s the thing you should focus on most.”
While such reductions represent progress, Andrew Stout, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University, cautioned that cost improvements at the laboratory level do not automatically translate into affordable consumer products.
“You probably need to have something that costs something like a dollar per liter,” Stout said.
Processes that function reliably in small-scale experiments can behave differently in industrial systems, where maintaining consistency across large volumes becomes a central challenge.
The industry is also facing broader economic pressures.
Declines in funding lead to stalled expansion
In late 2025, several cultivated meat companies reduced operations or scaled back expansion plans as venture funding declined. For a field that depends heavily on capital-intensive infrastructure, shifts in investment can shape not only the pace of development but also which companies survive.
Mozdziak described a wave of early investment followed by setbacks, as companies with large funding struggled to deliver products and newer entrants faced a more constrained funding environment.
“A lot of folks started cultivated meat companies because they had the ability to do it quickly, not because they necessarily had the scientific skills to be able to see it to fruition,” Mozdziak said. “By the time conservative scientists got themselves going, it had been very difficult to raise money.”
These financial dynamics raise questions about expanding food access. If only the largest companies are able to sustain production at scale, the technology could become concentrated within a small number of firms—mirroring the structure of the existing meat industry, where a handful of producers control a large share of the market.
At the same time, proponents argue that cultivated meat offers a different model of production that could, in theory, reduce some of the vulnerabilities of the current system.
Because production occurs in controlled facilities rather than on farmland, it is less dependent on variables like weather, land availability or feed supply. This could reduce transportation costs and exposure to global trade disruptions by enabling production operations to move from rural to urban centers.
The price increases seen in 2025—driven in part by tariffs affecting feed and packaging—illustrate how changes in global supply chains can ripple through the food system.
In principle, a more localized production model could provide a buffer against such volatility. Whether that potential is realized will depend on whether companies can scale production while maintaining cost competitiveness.
Bringing cultivated meat to the market
So far, only a small number of cultivated meat products have reached the U.S. market. In 2023, UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat became the first companies to receive federal approval to sell cultivated chicken, marking an initial step toward commercialization.
Beyond technical and economic challenges, public perception and transparency may also influence the trajectory of the industry. Stout emphasizes that collaboration between academic institutions and private companies could play a role in building trust by making the underlying science more visible.
“By working across industry and academia, you, by definition, are putting your research out into the public,” Stout said. “And so I think there’s a lot of opportunities for increased transparency because of the collaboration.”
For communities already facing limited access to fresh food, the question is not only whether cultivated meat can be produced, but whether it can be made accessible.