South Korea to Open First Centre Dedicated to Cultivated Meat, With $10M in Public Investment

South Korea’s Uiseong County has won its bid to build a cultivated meat research centre, supported by $10M in government funding as part of the country’s food tech drive.

With regulatory support for cultivated meat ramping up in South Korea, the country’s first centre dedicated to cell-cultured foods is opening in Uiseong-gun, a city in the Gyeongsangbuk-do province.

The 2,660 sq m Food Tech Research Support Center is slated to open in 2027, and backed by public investment to the tune of ₩14.5B ($9.9M). The centre will pour in ₩5.25B ($3.6M), with the rest of the funds deployed by the local North Gyeongsang and Uiseong-gun governments.

Based in Uiseong-gun’s Bio Valley General Industrial Complex, the project was announced after the county was selected in the cell-cultured food field in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs’s (MAFRA) competition for the construction of food tech R&D centres.

It will help companies develop their processes, scale up production, and apply for regulatory approval, and is the latest move positioning South Korea as one of Asia’s future food leaders.

“The new facility is one of several set up by the MAFRA designed to ramp up development of food technology,” explains Mirte Gosker, managing director of alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) APAC.

“Understanding that future food development is big business, Uiseong County submitted a successful bid to MAFRA to host this new facility as a means of boosting its local economy,” she tells Green Queen.

Lee Chul-woo, governor of the North Gyeongsang province, called cellular agriculture “an innovative solution for the sustainable future food industry”. “The establishment of a core infrastructure at the Food Tech Research Support Center will serve as an opportunity for Gyeongbuk to leap to the center of the Korean food tech industry,” he noted.

Almost a dozen companies interested in new centre

The Food Tech Research Support Center plans to build a cellular agriculture system that can produce up to 100kg of cultivated meat per year, and support 60 new jobs. It will be run by the Gyeongbuk Technopark.

The facility will integrate research, development and commercial support, providing mass cultivation equipment and prototype production facilities, safety evaluation and licensing assistance, and infrastructure for the full-cycle industrialisation of cultivated food products.

According to Korean publication Gyeongbuk Ilbo, 11 companies have expressed their intention to move into the centre, including SeaWith, Micro Digital, and LMK. Meanwhile, Yeungnam University and the Animal Cell Proof-of-Sale Support Center are partner institutions.

“Other collaborations are under discussion with research institutions like the K-Bio CMO Center,” says Gosker, while potential partnerships with large corporations and initiatives like the World FoodTech Council are on the cards aswell.

These collaborations are also aimed at promoting the AI-based discovery of materials derived from natural products, food processing and robotics tech, and the quality control of cell-cultured production, according to Gyeongbuk Ilbo.

The new centre is “located next door to the existing Cell Culture Industry Support Center, which opened in 2023″, notes Gosker. “Both are within the special regulatory zone that South Korea established to accelerate domestic alternative protein innovation.” This $7M project harbours 10 cultivated meat firms that are exempt from restrictions on using biopsies and same-day slaughtered tissues in support of mass production of high-quality novel proteins.

South Korea ramps up support for novel proteins

The new facility is part of the province’s plans to develop the local economy by becoming a food tech leader. It has established a production facility for culture media, which will support downstream industries, including cell-culture materials and equipment manufacturing.

Further, the local government plans to launch consumer awareness initiatives aimed at normalising and popularising cultivated meat. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has established a framework for regulatory approval of these proteins, and polling shows that 90% of Koreans are willing to try cultivated meat, and two in five are in favour of it being sold at supermarkets and restaurants.

Outside Gyeongsangbuk-do, similar food tech support centres have been established in Iksan, Jeollabuk-do (for alternative foods) and Naju, Jeollanam-do (for food upcycling).

Last year, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries announced an investment of ₩29B ($21M) in research funding for plant-based and cultivated seafood technologies. Industry giant Pulmuone and Singapore’s Umami Bioworks have both made moves to manufacture cultivated fish products in South Korea recently.

And in November, leading food tech organisations signed a deal to advance market research and knowledge exchanges, increase policy coordination for novel food regulation, facilitate training, and increase awareness about alternative protein innovation.

“As part of its mission to improve food system stability and efficiency, MAFRA has been stepping up its strategic investments into emerging food technologies like cultivated meat,” says Gosker.

“These investments will further enhance what is already one of the world’s most advanced tech ecosystems, which includes 10 biotechnology innovation and manufacturing clusters, around 40 companies working across the alt protein value chain, and major multinational corporations like Samsung Biologics. Add to that the world’s highest number of scientific researchers per capita and South Korea is well-positioned to be a global powerhouse for cellular agriculture.”

Cultivated meat regulatory approval imminent in South Korea

GFI identified South Korea as one of the places to watch for regulatory progress in this field in 2025. “Our experts believe it’s a safe assumption that this will happen in 2025, possibly in the first half of the year,” reveals Gosker.

“Korean cultivated meat startup CellMEAT submitted its application for regulatory approval in early 2024 and the review process is expected to take around 270 working days (roughly one year),” she says. “If all goes well, the first product approval could theoretically come any day now.”

This, she adds, would “trigger a cascade of additional applications”, similar to what regulators have experienced in Singapore and the US (which just cleared its third cultivated meat product for sale).

Seoul-based startup Simple Planet previously indicated to Green Queen that it aims to obtain the regulatory greenlight for its cultivated meat this year as well.

“No individual country can reimagine the global protein supply – but a network of Asian R&D hubs working collaboratively to accelerate future-food development and manufacturing very well could,” says Gosker. “Korea is a central player in turning that dream into reality, alongside other established foodtech leaders like Japan, China, and Singapore, and rising economies like Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.”

She continues: “If this regional coalition works together to supercharge scientific research, leverage each country’s supply-chain strengths, and rapidly increase regulatory knowledge-sharing, the combined impact will be far greater than the sum of its parts.”