The US Food and Drug Administration’s inventory of human food made with cultured animal cells lists five completed consultations. Eight US states now prohibit the sale of those products. On 23 March 2026 the Eleventh Circuit held that federal poultry inspection law does not stop a state from banning a product the federal government has cleared.
And one of the five clearance holders, Believer Meats, is in receivership — its Wilson, North Carolina plant going to auction with a court hearing set for 20 August 2026.
That is the state of US market access for cultivated meat as of today. Federal clearance is necessary, it is expensive, it is slow — and it has been decisively established this year that it does not confer the right to sell anything to anyone.
The federal record: five clearances, four surviving companies
The FDA inventory is a public record and it is short. Every entry below was read on the agency’s own page, last updated 19 February 2026.
| CCC No. | Company | Food | Species | FDA response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | GOOD Meat, Inc. | Cultured chicken cell material | Gallus gallus | 20 March 2023 |
| 002 | UPSIDE Foods | Cultured chicken cell material | Gallus gallus | 16 November 2022 |
| 005 | Wildtype Inc. | Cultured salmon cell material | Oncorhynchus kisutch | 28 May 2025 |
| 008 | Mission Barns | Cultured pork fat cells | Sus scrofa domesticus | 7 March 2025 |
| 039 | Believer Meats | Cultured chicken cell material | Gallus gallus domesticus | 24 July 2025 |
Two things about this table are routinely misread.
The CCC numbers are file references, not a count. The jump from 008 to 039 does not mean thirty companies cleared in between; it means the agency numbers submissions, not completions.
More importantly, an entry in this inventory is a permanent record of a past event, not evidence of a going concern. Believer Meats received its letter on 24 July 2025 and ceased operations on 10 December 2025 — six weeks after completing USDA clearance, having raised $387m and spent roughly $154m on the plant. The FDA row remains. The company does not.
So the honest count of firms holding US federal clearance and still trading is four, not five. Anyone building a market model off the inventory row count is over-counting by 25% on day one.
Practical consequence: treat the FDA inventory as a regulatory archive, not a competitor list. Cross-check every entry against corporate status before using it in a market map.
The federal path also runs through USDA, for most products
Cell-cultured poultry and livestock products need a second authorisation. UPSIDE Foods holds a USDA grant of inspection and label approval from June 2023 — a fact that became central to its own litigation, because holding a grant of inspection makes a facility an “official establishment” under the Poultry Products Inspection Act, which is what its preemption argument depended on.
Wildtype is the exception that clarifies the rule: cultivated salmon is outside the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s jurisdiction, so its route was FDA-only. Seafood does not require the second door.
Eight states, three of them on a clock
The count of banning states is contested, and the disagreement is substantive rather than cosmetic. The National Agricultural Law Center’s compilation states in prose that seven states have passed bans — while its own table on the same page lists an eighth, South Dakota, whose moratorium took effect on 1 July 2026. The prose is stale relative to the table.
| State | Bill | Signed | In force | Type | Penalty | Expiry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | SB 1084 | 1 May 2024 | 1 July 2024 | Ban on manufacture, sale, distribution | 2nd-degree misdemeanour; admin fines to $5,000 per violation | None |
| Alabama | SB 23 | 7 May 2024 | 1 October 2024 | Ban | Class C misdemeanour; permit suspension | None |
| Mississippi | HB 1006 | Became law without signature (2025) | 1 July 2025 | Ban | Misdemeanour; fine to $500 and/or 3 months | None |
| Montana | HB 401 | 1 May 2025 | Not established | Ban | Not established | None |
| Indiana | HB 1425 | 6 May 2025 | 1 July 2025 | Moratorium, then labelling | Labelling: “This is an imitation meat product” | 30 June 2027 |
| Nebraska | LB 246 | May 2025 | Not established | Ban via “adulterated” classification | Deceptive Trade Practices Act enforcement | None |
| Texas | SB 261 | 20 June 2025 | 1 September 2025 | Ban on sale and offering for sale | Admin and civil penalties to $25,000 per day each; up to 1 year jail | 1 September 2027 |
| South Dakota | SB 124 | 12 March 2026 | 1 July 2026 | Moratorium | Class 2 misdemeanour: $500, 30 days, or both | 30 June 2031 |
Three of the eight — Indiana, Texas and South Dakota — sunset. Indiana’s lapses in under two years, Texas’s in just over two. That materially changes how a company should think about these markets: Texas is not a permanent exclusion, it is a two-year exclusion that a legislature must actively renew.
Separately, roughly 21 states have enacted alternative-protein labelling laws, which are a different instrument and are frequently miscounted as bans. Ohio’s HB 10, signed December 2025, is a labelling statute; Arizona (HB 2762, effective 12 September 2026), Idaho (SB 1270) and Virginia are labelling regimes taking effect this year. Tennessee operates a permit programme for cultivated meat sellers — a licensing route, not a prohibition.
Practical consequence: when scoping US launch geography, separate the three categories — sale bans, labelling mandates, and procurement restrictions — and record the sunset date. A compliance map that collapses them into “banned/not banned” will misprice both risk and duration.
Louisiana has written a ban that does nothing yet
The most under-reported item in this story is Louisiana’s SB 152, the Cell Cultured Food Products Act, enacted in 2026 with a trigger clause: it takes effect only if the US Supreme Court holds that prohibitions on cell-cultured food products do not violate the Constitution. Louisiana HB 512 carries the same trigger.
This is a state legislating a contingent ban to sidestep exactly the litigation risk that has consumed Florida and Texas. It also means a single Supreme Court holding would activate dormant law in at least one state automatically — a step-change risk that does not appear on any current compliance map, because the statute is not currently in force.
What the Eleventh Circuit actually decided
Upside Foods, Inc. v. Commissioner, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, No. 24-13640, decided 23 March 2026, opinion by Judge Brasher. The panel affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction and held Florida’s SB 1084 is not expressly preempted by the Poultry Products Inspection Act.
The reasoning matters more than the result, because it is a template.
The PPIA preempts state requirements “with respect to premises, facilities and operations of any official establishment.” The court anchored all three terms to physical, onsite activities of a poultry plant, and required a direct relationship to those activities. Reading “operations” broadly enough to cover a sales ban would swallow its narrower neighbours and render the statute’s savings clause meaningless.
On the separate “ingredient requirement” argument, the court held an ingredient requirement is a rule specifying what must go into a product — preservatives, spices, colouring agents — not a categorical prohibition on the product itself. Upside’s attempt to recast the ban as targeting the “ingredient” of cultured cells did not survive.
The panel distinguished National Meat Association v. Harris, 565 U.S. 452 (2012), on precisely this axis: the preempted California law directed slaughterhouses how to handle non-ambulatory pigs, commanding facilities to restructure onsite operations. Florida’s law “does not prescribe cell-harvesting methods, cultivator materials, or waste-disposal procedures.” It bans the end product.
Troutman Pepper Locke’s read of the decision states the consequence plainly: federal inspection regimes “do not require states to allow every federally regulated product onto their shelves.” Duane Morris described the opinion as a roadmap — a flat product ban survives preemption where a production-method rule would not.
Practical consequence: the preemption argument is now a poor investment for the industry in the Eleventh Circuit and, on this reasoning, likely elsewhere. Legal budget is better spent on the dormant Commerce Clause theory, which is the only one still standing.
Texas: the mirror image, and the reason injunctions are failing
Wildtype and UPSIDE Foods v. Shuford was filed in the Western District of Texas on 2 September 2025, one day after SB 261 took effect. On 16 January 2026 Judge Alan Albright ruled on the pending motions:
- Dismissed UPSIDE’s PPIA preemption claim
- Denied dismissal of the dormant Commerce Clause claim, which proceeds
- Denied the preliminary injunction
- Dismissed the Travis County Attorney for lack of jurisdiction
The preliminary-injunction reasoning is the part operators should read twice. The court found no irreparable harm because the plaintiffs lacked significant “contractual business already in place in Texas,” and held the balance of equities did not favour “two companies with very little business in Texas.”
That is a genuine bind, and it is structural rather than legal. A company that has not yet built commercial volume in a state cannot show the harm needed to stop the state banning it — but the ban is precisely what prevents it building that volume. The remedy is available in proportion to the business you already have, and these companies have very little anywhere.
Plaintiffs appealed the injunction denial to the Fifth Circuit; the appellants’ opening brief is dated 1 June 2026. No Fifth Circuit decision had issued as of 15 August 2026.
Note the symmetry across the two states: Texas dismissed the preemption claim and kept the Commerce Clause claim; Florida lost preemption at the circuit level while its Commerce Clause claim remains live in the Northern District of Florida — where, as of July 2026, Florida officials were urging the judge to dismiss it as “vague and unsubstantiated.” The dormant Commerce Clause is now the industry’s entire legal case in both states.
The commercial footprint is smaller than the legal fight
Against eight state bans and two federal appellate proceedings, here is what is actually being sold.
Retail. Mission Barns’ cultivated pork meatballs went on sale at Berkeley Bowl West in Berkeley, California — a 304 g tray of eight at $13.99, a one-time sale, one pack per shopper. That was the first cultivated meat sold in a US grocery store and only the second such instance globally, after GOOD Meat at Huber’s Butchery in Singapore. Mission Barns also has a Sprouts listing in Oakland and restaurant placement at Fiorella in San Francisco.
Foodservice. Wildtype’s cultivated coho salmon has run at four restaurants: Kann in Portland, Otoko in Austin, Robin in San Francisco, and The Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle.
The Austin listing is the clearest evidence of commercial impact from a ban anywhere in this story: it was a limited-time offering because of the incoming Texas prohibition, and the Institute for Justice confirms both companies “had to put further plans in Texas on hold.” UPSIDE likewise cancelled a planned Miami tasting event after Florida’s ban.
Set that against the supply side. Believer Meats’ 200,000 sq ft Wilson County plant was rated at 12,000 tonnes of cultivated chicken a year. The company is insolvent, and the plant is being auctioned this week. The gap between licensed nameplate capacity and actual sales — one one-day grocery run and four restaurant menus — is the real story of the sector in the US, and the state bans are not its primary cause.
Practical consequence: do not model state bans as the binding constraint on US cultivated meat revenue in 2026. Cost and capital are. The bans are a constraint on the future in which the cost problem has been solved.
The counter-argument: the bans matter more than the sales figures suggest
The strongest case against the reading above is one of sequencing.
Current sales are tiny, so current losses to bans are tiny. But a plant is financed against a decade of addressable market, not this quarter’s covers. Florida and Texas are the third and second most populous states; removing them from a pro forma changes the terminal value that justified the capex, and it changes it before the product is ready. On this view the bans work exactly as intended — not by stopping present sales but by making future sales unfinanceable, which is a cheaper and more durable form of prohibition.
The Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning strengthens that case, because it hands legislatures a tested template. And the sunsets are less reassuring than they look: a legislature that banned a product once, facing no organised in-state constituency for it, may find renewal easy.
There is also a real chance the industry loses the remaining theory. If the dormant Commerce Clause claim fails, the bans become durable, and Louisiana’s contingent statute activates on a Supreme Court holding to that effect.
Where the counter-pressure is coming from
Not, so far, from the courts. From governors.
South Dakota’s Governor Larry Rhoden vetoed HB 1077, which would have classified cultivated protein as adulterated food — an effective permanent ban — in his only veto of the session. His stated reasoning is the sharpest articulation of the state-level counter-case on record: the bill “risks placing an undue burden on interstate commerce, proposes a protectionist economic benefit to in-state industries, and invites expensive constitutional challenges.” The override attempt failed. A separate 10-year prohibition, HB 1109, also failed, and SB 124 itself was cut from ten years to five at the governor’s urging.
Wisconsin’s Governor Evers vetoed AB 554, a labelling restriction bundled with a school-service ban.
Most striking, the South Dakota Cattlemen’s Association told Brownfield Ag News that while cultivated protein is not something the industry promotes, “we recognise they are approved and inspected by the Food and Drug Administration and USDA, and we have confidence in the food safety system” — and that the temporary pause “alleviated concerns about market retaliation for traditional ag products and costly litigation.”
That is a producer group naming the two things that actually restrain these bills: trade retaliation risk and litigation cost. Neither is an argument about cultivated meat.
What we could not establish
- Montana HB 401’s effective date and penalty structure. The signature date (1 May 2025) is confirmed; the Montana legislature’s bill-history servers are bot-protected and we could not read the enacted text.
- Nebraska LB 246’s exact signature date. Reported only as “May 2025” on the sources we could read. A date of 20 May 2025 appears in secondary material we could not confirm.
- South Dakota’s sunset date. Two National Agricultural Law Center pages conflict — one says 30 June 2030, the other 30 June 2031. Multiple sources describe a five-year moratorium from 1 July 2026, which makes 2031 the arithmetically consistent figure, and that is what we have used. It should be checked against the codified text before being relied on.
- The Texas statutory citation. The same organisation cites SB 261’s ban at Tex. Health & Safety Code § 433.057 in one document and at §§ 431.002(5-a), 431.02105(a) in another. We could not reconcile these and have cited the bill rather than the code section.
- Whether UPSIDE has sought rehearing en banc or filed a petition for certiorari following the Eleventh Circuit decision. We found no filing, and no confirmation that the deadline passed or that the company declined. This is not a minor gap: Louisiana’s ban activates on a Supreme Court holding, so the existence of a cert petition is load-bearing.
- Believer Meats’ USDA authorisation date. Reported as October 2025; the FDA date (24 July 2025) is confirmed, the USDA one is not.
- Any reliable market-size figure. Every projection we found came from vendor market-research listings with undisclosed methodology and mutually inconsistent numbers. We have used the concrete quantities instead — 12,000 tonnes of rated capacity, one grocery sale, four restaurants.
We also note that one widely circulated claim — that a Texas bench trial took place on 17 February 2026 — appears to be a conflation. The Texas hearing was 16 January 2026. A W.D. Tex. order dated 11 February 2026 belongs to a different case, the SB 25 food-labelling challenge, in which the court granted a preliminary injunction on First Amendment grounds.
What to watch
Four testable things, each of which will resolve within about a year:
- The Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the Texas preliminary-injunction appeal, briefed since 1 June 2026. If it affirms on the “no existing business, no irreparable harm” reasoning, that logic becomes portable to every future state ban.
- The Northern District of Florida’s decision on Florida’s motion to dismiss the dormant Commerce Clause claim. This is the theory’s first real test on the merits.
- Whether a certiorari petition is filed, and if so whether it is granted — the trigger condition written into Louisiana’s statute.
- Indiana’s moratorium lapsing on 30 June 2027, the first natural expiry. Whether it is renewed, allowed to lapse, or converted into a permanent ban is the best available signal for how the other two sunsets will go.
Our position, stated so it can be checked later: the preemption route is closed, the Commerce Clause route is genuinely uncertain, and neither will determine US cultivated meat volumes before 2028 — because on the evidence above, the sector is not currently capacity-constrained or demand-constrained by state law. It is constrained by the same thing that took down a company holding a full federal clearance: the cost of making the product.