China’s cell-cultured meat industry just hit a new milestone. In mid-December, construction was completed on the country’s largest cell-cultured meat pilot plant. The site is operated by Nanjing Zhouzi Future Food Technology Co. (南京周子未来食品科技有限公司), a pioneer in the Chinese industry.
Since opening, the facility has already been used to carry out the world’s first large-scale trial production of cell-cultured pork in a 2,000-litre bioreactor, marking a shift from laboratory experimentation to industrial-scale engineering validation.
The milestone caps a six-year trajectory that began in 2019, when a research team led by Professor Zhou Guanghong at Nanjing Agricultural University produced China’s first piece of cell-cultured meat. Zhouzi Future was spun out in 2020 to industrialise that work, achieving pilot production in a 500-litre bioreactor in 2023. Scaling to 2,000 litres moves the company – and China’s broader cultivated-meat sector – into a new phase focused on getting costing right and processes in line with regulation, all with a view to mass rollout.
China’s largest cell-cultured meat plant boasts an annual capacity of 10 to 50 tonnes, it is designed less as a commercial factory than as an engineering proving ground, generating the data needed to design future 10,000-tonne-class facilities. For an industry long criticised for remaining trapped in the lab, that matters.
Domestically, demand for meat-alternatives is high. Globally, cell-cultured meat is undergoing a similar trajectory. Since Singapore approved cultivated chicken for sale in 2020, companies such as Good Meat and Vow have brought products into restaurants and tasting venues across Asia and Australia. Regulatory approvals have expanded to multiple countries, and the pace has accelerated through 2024 and 2025.
Against that backdrop, Zhouzi Future’s plant positions China to compete not just in research, but in manufacturing know-how. The significance of China’s largest cell-cultured meat plant less in a single batch of cultured pork than in what it signals: cell-cultured meat in China is beginning to look like an industry, not an experiment.
