At around 7 p.m. on Dec. 19, 2020, three young adults and their teacher gathered for dinner at the restaurant of the swank 1880 club in Singapore. They ordered chicken and waffles and, on the side, chicken baos. “History Made,” proclaimed the menus, because those diners had eaten the world’s first portions of chicken meat manufactured from cells, rather than slain birds.

The location was unlikely, but no accident. After a California-based start-up, Eat Just, succeeded in cultivating chicken meat from cells, it chose Esco Aster, a Singapore-based synthetic biology (syn-bio) contract manufacturing company, to manufacture cultivated chicken nuggets and breasts as well as shredded chicken. Then the Singapore Food Authority (SFA) gave Eat Just permission to produce small batches of cultured cells in Esco Aster’s food-safe bioreactors, and to sell the products locally once they had met its stringent food safety criteria. Thus, the SFA became the world’s first regulatory authority to approve the sale of cultured chicken meat.

Unlike other nations, Singapore is wooing syn-bio start-ups across the world to make the city their home base. In addition to cell-based meats, the government is catalyzing the manufacture of proteins from plants, algae, and fungi. It has set up a Future Ready Food Safety Hub to help companies navigate its approvals process, and to speed up the launch of bio-engineered products.

Over two dozen syn-bio food companies—such as Shiok Meats, which recently launched the world’s first lab-grown crab and shrimp meats—have set up shop in Singapore. Thus, the city-state, which has hardly any farmland or livestock, plans to scale new technologies to meet its goal of producing 30% of its food locally by 2030, and boost economic growth by turning into one of the world’s first—and biggest—cultivated meat exporters.