Cultivated Meat Production and Where ABB Robots Fit

Cultivated meat production grows animal cells in a nutrient broth instead of raising and slaughtering animals. It has gone from a single lab burger in 2013 to approved products in several countries, but making it cheaply at scale is still unsolved, and the news in October 2026 shows how hard that is. Believer Meats' $150 million plant in North Carolina is up for sale by a court-appointed receiver, while UK start-up Meatly is moving into a site built for a 20,000-liter vessel. This post covers how meat was made before, how cultured meat began, where automation stands today and where ABB robots could fit.

Spring vegetable pasta with strips of GOOD Meat cultivated chicken, served at Huber's Butchery in Singapore in 2023. Photo: Jpatokal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Chicago stockyards to a burger grown in the lab

For most of history, meat meant raising animals and killing them. Industrial scale came with places like Chicago's Union Stock Yards, which opened on Christmas Day 1865 and handled two million animals a year by 1870. At the Armour plant, carcasses moved past workers on a disassembly line, a method that helped inspire the car assembly line Henry Ford popularized in 1913. Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle described the conditions in the yards around the turn of the century. The yards closed on 30 July 1971, after decades of decline as the meatpacking industry decentralized.

A postcard from around 1910 showing the sticking pen at Chicago's Union Stock Yards. Image: United Post Card & Novelty Co. via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The idea of skipping the animal is older than the technology. In 1931 Winston Churchill imagined escaping the absurdity of raising a whole chicken to eat the breast or wing by "growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." Willem van Eelen, whose time as a prisoner of war in the Second World War shaped his interest in food security, came up with the same idea on his own in the 1950s. In 2002 a NASA-funded experiment cultivated goldfish muscle tissue. The recipe has stayed much the same: take cells, usually stem cells, feed them a growth medium in a bioreactor and give them a scaffold to organise into tissue.

A cabinet of culture flasks at the MPI-CBG research institute, 2011. Photo: Matylda Sęk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first public test came on 5 August 2013, when Mark Post of Maastricht University had a cultured beef burger tasted on live television in London. It was built from more than 20,000 thin strands of muscle tissue and cost over $325,000. Approvals followed: Singapore cleared Eat Just's chicken bites in December 2020, the US approved Upside Foods and GOOD Meat chicken in June 2023, and Israel approved Aleph Farms beef in January 2024. Automation started early as well. In 2017 two students who met at Imperial College London founded Cytera CellWorks, which used robotic automation to set up cell cultures for clean meat.

Mark Post with the first cell-cultured hamburger, 2013. Photo: Mosa Meat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How cultivated meat plants run today

Scaling up has gone badly for some of the best-funded firms. Believer Meats raised almost $400 million, built a $150 million plant in Wilson, North Carolina, and stopped operating in December 2025. On 19 October 2026 the receiver reported a letter of intent from an unnamed buyer for the site, which comes with bioreactors and other equipment, after Upside Foods dropped a $50 million bid in August. Meatly is taking a cheaper route. CEO Owen Ensor says its new UK site, with a 2,000-liter bioreactor and a 20,000-liter vessel, needs only about £3 to 4 million in capital spending, and that Meatly sold Europe's first cultivated meat product, a pet food, after spending £5 million.

A 500 litre stainless steel bioreactor beside a tangential flow filtration system in a veterinary vaccine plant, 2026. Photo: CC1984USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Much of the automation announced so far is process control around the bioreactors. Germany's Innocent Meat is building an automated plug-and-produce system that would give meat companies cell lines, growth media, scaffolds, bioreactors and filtration in one package. The integrator E Tech Group built a Rockwell PlantPAx control system for a cultivated meat pilot plant. On the research side, New York's Pythag Tech raised $4.25 million in October 2026 for AI models that direct large-scale lab experiments on growth media, cell lines and bioprocessing, which it calls the three main cost drivers. Growth media still cost hundreds of dollars per litre and need to fall to around $1.

An Eppendorf epMotion 5075 liquid handling robot in a lab. Photo: Magnus Manske / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

We found no ABB robot in a cultivated meat plant, but ABB arms already do similar lab work in biotech. In 2022 the AI company XtalPi bought over 100 ABB GoFa cobots for automated lab workstations in Shanghai. There they open lids, handle liquids, add samples, filter, dilute and stir, and mobile robots carrying GoFa arms move samples between stations. ABB's cleanroom robots are certified to ISO 14644-1 for life sciences, biotech and pharmaceutical work, with sealed bodies that keep out particles, microorganisms and liquids and that stand up to disinfection with strong detergents.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at one of the automated lab workstations ABB built with XtalPi in China. Photo: ABB

Where cultivated meat production goes next

Meatly's plan shows what proving the economics will take. Ensor says 20,000 liters is the largest single vessel Meatly will ever need; once one runs well, the plan is to run many in parallel and prove commercially viable unit economics within about two years. He also says the industry has shown its products can taste good and win approval, but has not yet shown it can scale and reach price parity. For households, the first contact may well be through pets, since Meatly's first product was pet food. In April 2025 Vow's cultured quail became the first cultured meat approved in Australia and New Zealand.

Three cultivated sausages from Ivy Farm, 2023. Photo: Ivy Farm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

No ABB cultivated meat project has been announced, so this part is a possibility. GoFa cobots could open vessels, handle liquids and move samples next to scientists, as they do for XtalPi. Cleanroom arms could work inside sterile zones, and at the end of the line an IRB 360 FlexPicker, which ABB offers in a stainless IP69K wash-down version, could pack finished products. A cell like that would normally be laid out and tested first in RobotStudio. Our posts on cell therapy manufacturing and bioprinting cover similar sterile work with living cells.

An ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robot picks toppings above the BurgerBots line. Photo: ABB

Money and biology are still the hard parts. Fetal bovine serum, the traditional source of growth factors, costs around $1,000 a litre, and Ensor says the work now is optimising media, bioreactors and processes, then keeping production sterile and consistent every single week. Investors have pulled back, and he says the money is going into AI instead. ABB pitches its cleanroom robots as a way to cut the risk of contamination, but a plant also needs staff who can run bioprocesses and keep the automation working, and each product still needs approval country by country.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

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