I think the market for plant based meat substitutes and cell cultured meat has the potential for massive growth. There are still some kinks to work out but tremendous progress is being made.
You can help out animals and the environment and make money at the same time.
Am an investor in both cell-cultured meat and plant-based meat. Personally I'm more bullish about plant-based meat, though cell-based is an important plan B
Plant-based meat substitutes are getting pretty good days, but it will be interesting to see how soon we can sustainably produce lab-grown meat at scale. I've been a vegetarian for about two years now for both environmental and ethical reasons, but I would be perfectly alright with eating meat again if that tech matures enough to enter the market at a reasonable price.
Cell-cultured meat industry veteran (and dropout) here. If Singaporean companies are able to make a viable business out of cell-cultured meat, that would be fantastic, and a boon to the world. Some skepticism is warranted, though. It's very difficult to do this at scale, and that's regardless of unit price. Cultivating the meat that sells at a mass-market price is the real challenge and one I wouldn't bet on anytime soon, not even by 2030. The technical challenges are too many to list here, some of which are not public knowledge. Besides, the once-touted environmental advantages have turned out to be marginal at best.
One way this business might make sense would be to sell boutique cell-cultured "specialty" meats, like scallops, veal, and wooly mammoth (yes, it's been seriously considered). They're not nearly as price-sensitive, and the scale is smaller. Here's hoping we can ease the burden on endangered populations and mitigate the inherent cruelty of some of those industries with cell-cultured alternatives.
This is a good outline of the major challenges for cultivated meat and one reason why we’ve had difficulty finding investable opportunities in this space.
I do expect plant-hybrid will be necessary and can significantly bring down the cost. Customers are concerned with taste, texture, cost, convenience, and health. Some plant-based alternatives are already challenging taste and cost (we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog) and cell based hybrids may be able to make additional improvements.
On the need for hormones, we invested in Japanese company, integriculture, because it solves this problem by coculturing organ cells (like liver and pancreas) that product these hormones natively.
As far as go to market, I expect there will be better opportunities with cosmetics where you could sell something for $1,600/lbs while volumes are still low.
I predict that the biggest market for lab-grown meat (in vitro cultivation) is going to be growing for meat grown from the cells of animals that aren't economical, practical or even legal as meat today.
People seem to be assuming that just because they mostly eat beef and chicken today that they're going to be buying lab grown beef and chicken, but ultimately they only eat that because it's economical to raise those animals with current production methods.
With in vitro cultivation there's no reason you wouldn't have say elephant meat one day, and a blue whale the day after that. You could even have some human meat, it's not like growing some muscle fibers in a test tube is unethical.
Initially there'll be a big market for the novelty of exotic meats, but over the long term it's highly unlikely that the meats we have today optimized for mass production will objectively taste better than potential alternatives, or even that the market will restrict itself to naturally occurring species of animals.
You'll be able to buy tuna with the texture of pork, or any other possible combination of tastes and textures.
I'm an angel investor in both plant based meat and clean meat and I'm actually more optimistic for plant based meat becoming better than animal meat in the short term. The rate of innovation has been really impressive and momentum is picking up steam.. once prices get under animal meat huge amounts of people will switch
I'm really hoping that in the next 5 or 10 years that "clean meat" or meat created from animal cells becomes a viable alternative. This is the future, and with it we will drive costs down and food safety up.
You assume the massively successful product would the lab grown meat itself.
It might be, but perhaps a bigger hit could be elsewhere: in licensing technology; support services; leasing lab equipment; consumable ingredients or something else entirely.
I'm hoping that lab grown meat takes off. I believe that this is on par with expanding solar power and electric cars in terms of combating global warming.
More customers is exactly why food prices will go up. This isn't really much of a debate in the realm of developmental economics. Income goes up, demand goes up, and production doesn't keep up at the same rate. The result is higher prices.
Cell-based meat currently only solves the ethical dilemma of meat. It's economies of scale are not strong. You need a lot of energy (GHG heavy), refined inputs, and no one talks about the ironic use of FBS.
As a matter of fact, since you bring up long term, cell based falls short of regenerative animal ag in terms of cost of and GHG mitigation over 100 year span.
If you use current technology for growing cells I can easily believe that it will never be competitive. Even with economies of scale that is rather sensitive work that is very easily spoiled. Unless you figure out how to ensure clean-room conditions for low cost this part alone might make this too expensive.
But I don't see how there could be any kind of insurmountable problem here. Animals "solve" this problem for us right now, so there is a way. I just think that the solution has to be quite different than how we grow cell cultures in the lab right now.
Short term I'd be really skeptical on the prospects of replacing meat in this way. But long term is an entirely different question.
Apparently it's all rainbows and sunshine from here on out. I really don't see the meat industry dying out for a long time, and I have some doubts about how easy it will be to be able to ship "in vitro kits" to food deprived nations. Maybe someday, but not for decades is my guess. I'm curious as to how much the materials that the cells grow in will cost, and how hard that will be to make.
One of the commenters put it well:
"In Vitro meat will do to pasture grown meat what margarine did to butter. Despite nearly 50 years of food science, still the most economical way of getting the wonderfully rich flavor of butter is to milk it out of cows.
In vitro meat will be fine for industralized meat products that just want the approximate taste & texture of meat but anybody wanting a fine steak is still going to get it from good old fashioned cows."
I remember similar stories about solar panels and wind energy decades ago, and they are definitely viable now. The lab grown meat industry will either have to wait for a break through or for meat prices to sky rocket. Both are probable in the next few decades.
Lab Grown meat / food is an area I am incredibly bullish on. I need to find a good way to invest and put my money where my mouth is. I imagine a future where we are able to grow large amounts of meat (fish, beef, chicken, etc) near cities where we are drastically reducing the environmental effects. This will also be a huge boon for seafood as fishing is really destroying the ocean. With economies of scale, I think we will get to the point in say 50 years where the luxury option is "real" beef or "real" fish but we have meat at the price point of rice.
I agree. As a vegetarian, I think those alternative products are very good and close enough to meat for burgers, sausages, nuggets etc. How is lab grown meat going to compete?
If lab grown meat, even if at first it is only hamburger, can be economically viable, then the boon to tissue engineering science could be very big indeed. There would be much more work done on bioreactors and biomaterials.
I’m with you on everything but the cultured meat. If it’s real cells grown in an environment with no antibiotics or hormones that’s a huge win over growing an entire animal that stands in its own crap all day and is pumped full of growth chemicals and antibiotics so it doesn’t die.
I’d love to buy my own self contained steak 3D printer for $10k
Several startups are trying to grow real meat in vitro.
Memphis Meats (which is in San Francisco, not Tennessee) has succeeded in growing chicken in vitro from stem cells. Mark Post at the University of Maastricht has been able to grow beef in vitro. This stuff tastes like meat from animals. It's the production cost that's the problem.
That's going to be the good stuff. Further downscale are the processed soy products. These are Soy Extender 2.0; textured vegetable protein processed to make it taste more like meat. You can buy soy hamburger patties now, under the Beyond Meat brand. Whole Foods carries them. Anyone tried one?
You can help out animals and the environment and make money at the same time.
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