ZURICH. A spin-off company from EPFL has moved its cultured chicken product into the final stage of Switzerland's novel food approval process, bringing laboratory-grown meat closer to a European dinner plate than it has ever been. The Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office confirmed receipt of a complete application dossier, the first from a Swiss company for a cultivated meat product.
The product begins as a small sample of cells taken from a living chicken, which recovers unharmed. In a bioreactor, the cells are fed a broth of nutrients, amino acids and growth factors, and they multiply over two to three weeks into sheets of muscle tissue that are then harvested and shaped.
The technical advance that distinguishes the EPFL approach is the growth medium. Earlier cultured meat relied on serum derived from calf foetuses, which was both expensive and ethically awkward. The Lausanne team developed a fully synthetic medium built from plant-based proteins, cutting production costs by roughly two thirds and removing the last animal input from the process.
Texture presented the second great problem. Muscle cells grown in suspension form a slurry, not a steak, so the team grows them on edible scaffolds of plant fibre that guide the cells into aligned fibres resembling the grain of real meat. The result passes blind tastings as minced and formed products, though a cultured chicken breast with the structure of the original remains years away.
Approval in Switzerland would carry weight beyond the domestic market, because the country's food safety assessments are recognised by several partner regulators and watched closely by the European Food Safety Authority. Singapore and the United States have already approved cultured chicken, but no product has yet cleared the more demanding European process.
The company was founded by researchers from EPFL's Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering, with early funding from the university's own venture programme and later rounds led by Swiss and German food industry investors. It now employs around 30 people at a pilot facility in the Lausanne area.
Substantial hurdles remain. The largest bioreactor at the pilot plant holds 500 litres, enough for a few hundred kilograms of product per batch, and scaling to industrial volumes without contamination is the challenge on which several rival firms have already stumbled. The final product also remains several times more expensive than conventional chicken. Energy use per kilogram, an environmental sticking point, is falling but has not yet reached parity with intensive poultry farming.
“The science is done; what remains is engineering and paperwork,” said the company's head of regulatory affairs. “We are confident on both fronts, but we do not control the calendar.”
The path from laboratory to market runs first through restaurants. Under the application, the company proposes to supply a small number of chefs in Zurich and Geneva during a controlled launch, gathering traceability and consumer data before any retail sale is considered.
The food safety office has up to 24 months to complete its assessment, though officials indicate that the clock could pause if further data are requested. A decision is therefore realistically expected no earlier than late 2027, with the European process likely to follow a parallel track.
Globally, more than 150 companies are now pursuing cultivated meat, though the field has thinned recently as investors demand clearer routes to profitability. Swiss grocery cooperatives have signalled interest in stocking an approved product, partly in response to customer surveys showing curiosity among younger buyers.
If approval arrives, the first cultured chicken legally sold in Switzerland will have been grown a short train ride from where the science was done. For a country that imports half its food, the prospect of manufacturing protein in a bioreactor holds a strategic appeal that goes beyond novelty.