According to a report by Blick, the Swiss supermarket chain Migros may be one step closer to selling meat grown in a laboratory. In collaboration with a number of international companies, scientists behind the “in-vitro” meat say they will be able to sell their product in Swiss cities and cantons by 2025.

Lab-grown meat hopes to replace conventional meat in the future

The new report by Blick discovered that progress towards lab-grown meat is particularly well advanced at Migros. The newspaper found that several weeks ago, the Israeli foodtech company Supermeat signed a letter of intent with Migros that hoped to promote the sale of lab-grown meat “on a large scale".

In-vitro, lab-grown or “cultured” meat is synthetic meat made by placing animal cells in a bioreactor which multiplies the cells into slices of chicken, beef or pork. The technology is already being trialled by hundreds of companies around the world and is hoped to replace conventional meat as 80 percent of agricultural land in the world is used to cultivate livestock, but meat products only account for 11 percent of global caloric intake.

Swiss supermarket Migros hopes to be the first to sell lab-grown meat in Europe

Supermeat CEO Ido Savir said that Migros’ “expertise and reach in food production and in the grocery business, coupled with Supermeat's advances in the industry, will create the conditions for bringing cultured meat to European consumers."  “We assume that we will be able to sell cultivated meat in Switzerland by 2025,” he concluded.

When speaking to Blick, Migros was slightly less enthusiastic than their partners, refusing to comment on the timetable proposed by the Supermeat CEO. However, they did say that at the first tasting, the Supermeat chicken was “not like meat, it is meat."

However, further research has suggested that the company is already making plans to introduce the product, with reporting from SonntagsBlick finding that Migros was already discussing how to approve in-vitro meat for sale with the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FVSO) in Bern. While it could not comment on the discussions, a spokesperson from the FVSO noted that it takes around one to three years to approve a product for sale.