Aleph Farms set up Singapore hub to drive APAC cultivated meat expansion through Cell AgriTech partnership

Aleph Farms has established Singapore as its Asia-Pacific cultivated meat hub through a strategic production partnership with Cell AgriTech Pte Ltd, as the company advanced its expansion across Southeast Asia and the wider APAC region.

• Aleph Farms partnered with Singapore-based Cell AgriTech to support cultivated meat scale-up and localization across Southeast Asia and the broader APAC region.
• The agreement positioned Singapore as Aleph Farms’ regional innovation and regulatory hub while leveraging Cell AgriTech’s pilot and scale-up manufacturing infrastructure.
• The partnership reflected an asset-light expansion strategy designed to reduce capital risk while preparing for regional commercialization.

Under the agreement, Cell AgriTech served as Aleph Farms’ contract development and manufacturing organization partner in Singapore and the wider Southeast Asia region. The collaboration provided Aleph Farms with access to pilot-scale and scale-up infrastructure, technical expertise, and facilities designed to support regulatory readiness, without requiring the construction of capital-intensive greenfield production plants.

As part of the expansion, Aleph Farms also established a Singapore-based legal entity to support regional operations, partnerships, and future commercialization activities across Asia.

The partnership aligned with Aleph Farms’ broader asset-light approach to cultivated meat commercialization, which prioritized collaboration with established regional partners rather than centralized mega-facilities. The company said this strategy allowed it to adapt production and product development to local market conditions while maintaining tighter control over capital expenditure and execution risk.

Aleph Farms said its staged regional expansion was built on several years of process optimization work and a published techno-economic validation, which enabled the company to define scalable and cost-efficient production pathways before committing to specific manufacturing footprints. This groundwork, the company said, allowed it to expand through partners such as Cell AgriTech with greater operational predictability than earlier cultivated meat models that scaled manufacturing before achieving cost clarity.

Through the partnership, Aleph Farms aimed to advance product localization, process development, and regional readiness for commercialization across Asia. Cell AgriTech’s existing infrastructure in Singapore and Malaysia was expected to support a phased scale-up approach as regional demand developed.

Singapore was positioned as Aleph Farms’ regional innovation, regulatory, and partnership hub, complemented by Cell AgriTech’s manufacturing presence in Malaysia. The hub-and-spoke model combined Singapore’s established innovation and regulatory ecosystem with Malaysia’s manufacturing scale and cost efficiency, allowing Aleph Farms to align early-stage development with longer-term production requirements.

“Asia is a critical region for the future of protein, and Singapore has built one of the world’s strongest ecosystems for cultivated meat,” commented Didier Toubia, Co-founder & CEO of Aleph Farms. “By partnering with Cell AgriTech, we established a long-term regional foothold that allowed us to move faster, remain capital-efficient, and reduce execution risk as we prepared for commercialization across Asia.”

David Cheng, Director at Cell AgriTech Singapore, said the company was supporting Aleph Farms as a CDMO partner by providing manufacturing infrastructure and expertise within Singapore’s regulatory and innovation environment.

“By leveraging our facilities and manufacturing expertise, we aimed to accelerate Aleph Farms’ scale-up in a capital-efficient manner while maintaining the highest quality standards,” Cheng said.

The partnership reflected the structure of the Asia-Pacific protein market, where a significant proportion of beef was imported and distributed through regional hubs such as Singapore and Malaysia. Aleph Farms said embedding cultivated meat production within this existing supply chain allowed cultivated beef to function as a practical complement to conventional meat systems rather than a parallel alternative.

The company added that its production platform was designed to support not only cultivated beef but also functional and nutrition-forward protein products, reflecting growing demand across Asia for health-oriented food innovation.

By establishing Singapore as its regional hub and leveraging Cell AgriTech’s infrastructure, Aleph Farms said it had created a foundation for scalable and flexible expansion across Asia, while preserving optionality as regulatory approvals and market demand evolved across different APAC markets.