Cultivated Meat Stumps Gourmand

Tel Aviv-based cultivated meat start-up SuperMeat hosted the world’s first public blind taste test between cultivated and conventional chicken. SuperMeat invited Israeli gastronome Michal Ansky, well-known in the food world as a professional taster and Master Chef judge, to see if she could determine which of two chicken products was cultivated in the lab. Ansky admitted in an interview that before the tasting she was confident she would be able to tell the difference.

However, after sampling two ground chicken dishes, sautéed alone in sunflower oil, Ansky chose the cultivated chicken as the ‘real chicken’. She was so convinced of her decision that when SuperMeat founder Ido Savir announced that she was wrong, she expressed disbelief. The results of the tasting are a big step forward in building consumer confidence in cultivated meat products and demonstrate how far the industry has come in a few short years.