Finger-licking “veggie meat!”

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KFC now wants to revolutionize food products by introducing the world’s first chicken nuggets, produced in a lab, which the company called “meat of the future”.

The chicken franchise has collaborated with the 3D Bioprinting Solution of a Russian company to produce bioprinting technology to “print” chicken meat, by using plant material and chicken cells.

Sounds….. Absurd?

The company will provide the bioprinting company with the necessary spices and ingredients “to achieve the signature KFC taste” and will aim to reproduce the texture and taste of the real chicken.

No, it wouldn’t be vegetarian!

As the bioprinting process involves the animal material, so the final product of nuggets would not be vegetarian.

Though, KFC does have a vegetarian option at its different restaurants. The chicken restaurant has become the first US fast-food chain that will introduce Beyond Meat’s plant-based chicken products, to be distributed to more places this summer.

According to KFC, laboratory-produced nuggets are supposed to be more environmentally friendly than the standard chicken meat. The benefits of growing meat from cells have also been proved in research published in the American Environmental Science and Technology Journal. The process will reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions as compared to conventional farming methods.

Well, it sounds promising!

“3D bioprinting technologies, initially widely recognized in medicine, are nowadays gaining popularity in producing foods such as meat,” co-founder of 3D Bioprinting Solutions, Yusef Khesuani, explained in a statement while announcing the collaboration with KFC. “In the future, the rapid development of such technologies will allow us to make 3D-printed meat products more accessible and we are hoping that the technology created as a result of our cooperation with KFC will help accelerate the launch of cell-based meat products on the market.”

So far, there are some hopeful developments in the use of bioprinting processes in medicine. Research is being carried out at the University of California that aims to bioprint various human organs for the purpose of transplantation. They observed that biological resources could be inclined to degeneration before the completion of the process. Their approach is to freeze the biological components while being printed.

Professionals believe that they’re still far behind from developing fully functional bioprinted human organs for patients requiring transplantation.

The final testing for bioprinted nuggets is scheduled for this fall in Moscow. There were no such details given for the process involved in the testing, though they said, “there are no other methods available on the market that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells.”

The availability of bioprinted nuggets for customer consumption hasn’t been announced yet.