Lab-Grown Meat Doesn't Want to Be Called Lab-Grown Meat

In an effort to make lab-grown meat sound a little bit more appetizing, the food technology companies that make it are renaming the category entirely. Lab-grown meat (also known as “in-vitro meat”) certainly doesn’t have the same ring to it as “veggie burger,” but, because it’s made of animal stem cells, it can’t pass as a vegetarian product.

To ensure that customers become more comfortable with the idea of eating meat that was grown in a lab, the industry is now working to rebrand lab-grown meat as “clean food.” Leading the charge is the Good Food Institute, a non-profit trade group.

Quartz reports that the organization is relying on research which found that “renaming foods to make them sound more appealing resulted in an increase in the sale of vegetables in the school cafeteria by 27 percent.”

The lab-grown meat industry has grown tremendously in recent years, thanks to major investment from venture capital firms and tech titans like Bill Gates. There are a number of companies looking to compete in the “in-vitro meat” space, though none are offering their products to consumers yet.

Impossible Foods, which has also seen investment from Gates, recently unveiled its first product, though it isn’t made from animal stem cells. The Impossible Burger is, however, a bit of a science experiment: the veggie-based burger has been engineered to both taste, and bleed, like real meat.

• To Lure People Put Off by the Freakiness of Lab-Made Meat, This is What the Industry Wants to Call It [Quartz]
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