Halal alternative meat, anyone? Cell-cultivated protein companies providing alternative offerings to the carbon intensive meat and dairy industry can label their products halal and kosher provided they comply with religious standards as they court a larger demographic of consumers, Reuters reports, citing advice from Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia to US food startup Eat Just.

Koshering the sector: Cell-cultivated or cultured meat can comply with Islamic law provided they are extracted from halal resources — i.e no pig-derived biopsies, three sharia law scholars told the US food startup Eat Just. Cultured meat creation involves the extraction of tissues from animals or plants then nurturing the sample of cells in a nutrient bath to enable multiplication before genetically modifying the tissues to differentiate between muscle and fat, and then binding the muscle cells into fibers. The Orthodox Union — the world’s largest kosher certification agency — said earlier this month Israeli company SuperMeat’s lab-grown chicken can be considered kosher because its cells were not fed any animal ingredients and were extracted from a fertilized egg before any blood spots appear, Reuters reports.

Where does the industry stand? The US and Singapore are the only countries so far that have approved designs by startups in the jurisdictions for the production of cultured meat. By 2040, 60% of protein consumed by humans could be either grown in vats or replaced by plant-based products that resemble meat. Alternative proteins as a whole could constitute 7.7% of the global protein market by 2030 — rising to USD 162 bn from USD 29.4 bn in 2020.

The MENA market is still small, but it’s growing: Eat Just is partnering with Qatari state-backed Doha Venture Capital and the Qatar Freezones Authority to build a USD 200 mn cultivated-meat facility in Qatar’s Umm Alhoul Freezone. Over in Oman, food technologies company MycoTech and the Oman Investment Authority (OIA) agreed last year to set up a JV to leverage the natural sugar of dates as carbon to fuel the production of mushroom-based protein. OIA and MycoTech are due to start construction on a production facility in 1H 2023, with commercial operations due to begin in 2Q 2025.

Recent regional developments could fuel growth further: The UAE’s Switch Foods kicked off operations on its new alternative protein production factory in Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa’s Industrial Zone last May. Earlier in March, KSA’s petrochemical company Saudi Industrial Investment Group (SIIG) signed an agreement to acquire a 24% stake in Denmark’s sustainable protein company Unibio International. The acquisition will be made through an investment of c.USD 70 mn in the Danish company, with a 9.9% stake acquired in the first phase. The remaining stake would be acquired by SIIG in which the Saudi government owns a 13.1% stake after obtaining necessary approvals for FDI from the Danish government.