Californian startup Mission Barns will hold the US’s first retail sale of cultivated meat on November 1, selling pork meatballs at Berkeley Bowl West.
Next week, Americans can walk into a grocery store and buy cultivated meat off the shelf for the first time.
The product in question is made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco-based startup that has received FDA and USDA approval to sell its cultivated pork fat in the US.
Its pork meatballs will be sold at Berkeley Bowl West, an independent grocery store on Heinz Avenue, on November 1, with each 304g tray priced at $13.99. The one-time sale will be held at 3pm in aisle 16 of the store, and the limited stock means shoppers can only buy one pack each.
The retail debut comes nearly two months after Mission Barns introduced its cultivated meatballs and bacon to diners at Fiorella restaurant in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Now, it is hosting a four-part tasting series at Berkeley Bowl West, titled Bites from the Barn, starting the same day as the sale.
Public tasting series to spotlight cultivated meatballs and salami
Bites from the Barn is being billed as the “largest free-to-the-public cultivated meat tasting series ever held”, and will offer consumers a chance to taste the future-facing products and engage directly with Mission Barns’s team.
Each event will feature live cooking demonstrations and opportunities to meet the company’s scientists to learn about the tech used to produce its cultivated pork products.
The tastings will be held once per month. The first, on November 1, will spotlight the meatballs, while the second will feature Mission Barns’s Italian-style dry-cured salami on December 12. The final two events, on January 16 and February 21, will give consumers a taste of the meatballs too.
On launch day, one of the meatball packs will contain a golden ticket, the recipient of which will be invited to a private tasting and tour at the startup’s facility in San Francisco.
“We’ve been excited to work with Mission Barns for many years, and these meatballs – made with their cultivated pork fat – deliver the same flavour and texture as conventional pork while offering an option for our meat-loving and flexitarian customers,” said Anthony LeBlanc, head meat buyer at Berkeley Bowl.
“Berkeley Bowl has long been a launchpad for innovative food brands,” he added. “We’re proud to be the first US grocery store to offer cultivated pork to our customers.”
The company’s CEO, Cecilia Chang, said the tasting series is an open invitation to join the mission to make meat tastier and healthier than the market standard. “We talk about scaling technology, but real change scales through people voting with their plates. That’s why this series matters: it’s where health meets flavour, innovation meets community, and the movement truly begins to grow,” she noted.
Mission Barns partners with Tufts to gauge consumer acceptance
Mission Barns uses belly fat cells from American Yorkshire pigs and grows them in bioreactors to make its Mission Fat. This fat is then mixed with plant-based ingredients to make products like meatballs, bacon, sausages, and salami.
This hybrid approach allows the startup to keep costs from soaring too high and scale production in an efficient manner. And since fat is the primary flavour carrier in food, even a little bit goes a long way in replicating conventional meat.
Mission Fat will appear on the label as a composition of purified water, cell-cultivated pork fat cells, and kosher salt. It’s mixed with pea protein, coconut oil, Italian seasonings, methylcellulose and other ingredients to make the meatballs.
Now, the company is collaborating with researchers at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture, who will capture real-world feedback and consumer attitudes at the tasting series, in a bid to inform future study design and public acceptance frameworks.
“This partnership gives us a unique opportunity to study how consumers encounter cultivated meat outside the R&D lab or focus group setting,” said Sean Cash, an economist and professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “Understanding how people experience and talk about these novel products in everyday environments will be key to shaping responsible and transparent innovation across the food system.”
Mission Barns has also earned a listing at Sprouts Farmers Market, and was aiming to hit shelves in Oakland in Q3. Green Queen has contacted the startup for updates on this partnership.
The sale at Berkeley Bowl West will only be the second instance of a cultivated meat product being available in retail. Last year, fellow Californian firm Eat Just launched its Good Meat cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery in Singapore.
Meanwhile, there’s another cultivated protein on sale in the US. Wildtype’s cultured coho salmon is available at restaurants in Oregon, California, Washington and New York. It was previously also available in Texas, before the state’s ban on cultivated meat came into effect, sparking a lawsuit from Wildtype and cultivated chicken maker Upside Foods.
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