There is a decent chance this article is correct but I also dislike part of article's focus.
The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing plant without considering the size of all the (organic?) bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'.
Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost & thermodynamics.
Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists [1]. Sucks that pricing isn't easy to get but I think it is still more expensive than fixed/reusable vessels at least over time.
It's really hard to know without having more knowledge about the specifics of but I think there's a lot of unexplored areas that makes these projects worthwhile.
Although I don't know whether lab grown meat will be cost-competitive with traditional meat in the near future, the article's thesis "Lab Grown meat will never be cost competitive with traditional meat" assumes a few key points that seem non-intuitive, and makes me wonder if the article is written in good faith:
> The cost of a lab-grown meat facility is comparable to a slaughterhouse.
The footprint and cost of a slaughterhouse does not include the footprint and cost of the places meat is actually grown. The article notes the lab is 'slightly cheaper' than a slaughterhouse - when you add in the space and facilities needed to raise cows I suspect the cost gap significantly increases.
> Lab grown meat would have to be produced in Class 8 clean rooms.
My understanding is that clean rooms have much higher standards than other food processing facilities. Cell cultures today are grown to be studied in tiny amounts so small amounts of contamination need to be strenuously avoided. If we're instead concerned with the volume of production, I'd expect any amount of dirtiness below the incredible filth of a slaughterhouse is likely a win.
> There will be no advancements in cell density of lab-grown meat.
The article assumes lab grow meat will continue to be grown as a single cells in culture. While this is the state of the art today, I'd expect many companies and labs are hard at work on denser strategies. As the article capitulates, cultivated meat could be economically viable "[when] companies can make cells grow beyond certain widely recognized biological limits. Higher cell density means more meat per batch, which in turn means the number of bioreactors can fall, and the size of the clean room can shrink."
All together, I think lab-grown meat is a lot less of a certain-failure than the article seems to suggest.
>Without scale and centralization, cultured meat will be no different from any other food production method: expensive.
Honestly, one of my takeaways was to consider investing in this Future Meat company.
The above quote conflates two kinds of scaling: scaling the reactor (which Future Meat said they can't do) versus scaling the process. You don't need to build a bigger reactor if you can just build a really big machine that makes small reactors. And the great thing about this approach is that a huge bioreactor-building machine (poetically bioreactor-reactor) is invulnerable to contamination, heretofore the biggest problem in lab-grown meat.
The natural comparison is to a car: building a single car will never be economically viable and never has been. But building 10 million cars is absolutely viable.
The article says you need 40 000 of these to replace our meat consumption:
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
You know what the total value of the entire worlds meat industry is today? Less than a trillion. So if we could run those labs for free, it would only take a bit over 80 000 years to for them to pay off. But of course they can't run for that long and they need manpower etc. Now if we mass produce those labs it might become cheaper, but will it really get ten thousand times cheaper?
Now, you could say that costs go down with scale. But we also know that projected costs of large projects rarely stay that low, likely those facilities would cost way more than that at first. And price would have to go down really quickly, as just building the first 10 would cost the equivalent of 20 year of meat production.
Well the long and short of that is the infrastructure and space usage of livestock etc. aren't ignored, they're part and parcel of what the cost of bringing meat to your plate is. Can't say what exact breakdowns are, likely the answer is "it depends" on the meat and cut/grade/etc but there will be industry reports and such so I'm sure you can find something. The fundamental point here is that the analysis says that at no point soon does a bioreactor get cheaper than livestock, and will likely remain significantly more expensive for a long time if these promised magical breakthroughs do not occur (and I say promised since they're looking for investment, so if they don't then it's a massive loss on everyone's parts).
Humbird estimated $17-$40 for a pound of ground meat by 2030. Future Meat has already reached $18 for cultured ground "chicken" but as the article points out is unlikely to go lower. Currently, ground beef costs about $4 per pound. $4. That's how much everything, from infrastructure to land use to feed to water to labour to delivery costs for the same ground beef you'd get from livestock as you'd get straight out of the bioreactor (which they said was 70% water and 30% basically ground meat). A round steak costs about $6 per pound if you're lucky, and often higher. Going for steak with meat cultures this would drive the price well beyond $17 since you'd need to do a LOT more work in processing it.
Livestock has been scaled out very efficiently by ignoring all the environmental damages it causes. Since the whole point of this is to not "cut corners", they're already on the back foot, and the article explains many of the concerning avenues they are considering to even try and get close to dropping the price.
Ultimately, livestock has been optimised, and isn't getting cheaper, quite the opposite. Prices are slowly rising for meat. But the "hidden" cost is the environmental damage (a damning cost at that). Scaling out the bioreactors physically with higher capacity is how you'd drop the cost of cultured meat at the same volume, fewer larger reactors being more efficient than many smaller ones, since the pharmaceutical industry has failed to make game changing breakthroughs in the other approaches to making more efficient cultures that would meet this need in recent years (though, as mentioned, Future Meat has done just this, but would still need economy of scale to get competitive).
They could scale up tomorrow with ten thousand times as many reactors without making a real dent in their efficiency, simply replicating what they already have, and still be forced to sell at cost like Eat Just or sell at an unjustifiable price. Current cost according to the article is typically between $10k and $22k per pound. That's obscene. Getting down to $17 per pound, or even close such as Future Meat with it's incredible $18 per pound, is still a losing battle. After all, even if we removed subsidies and doubled the price of meat, that's still significantly cheaper than ground meat cultures, let alone being processed.
Meanwhile, plant-based alternatives and such are already reaching the point of being cost competitive, with $6 per pound for a Beyond Beef burger, and an average price of $9 per pound for meat alternatives, and some people are already switching. So if there's anything that governments should focus on, it's the one that's clearly successful (and in way more volume) and just about a similar win in terms of soy/grain usage and similar.
Is the article perfect? No. Is it correct? Most likely. I don't think the focus is off, though I do think that there's some ground work that could have been done, showing breakdowns of costs and such in a clearer way, though clearly it's prose in the end while the reports speak for themselves. Talking about the story of the analysis and what it actually means for the likely future of meat culture. Hopefully I've collected those points you were looking for a little bit here, though not being an industry expert naturally I've been unable to trivially procure breakdowns for how much is labour costs per pound etc., so mostly it's a denser version of the factoids in the article and what's readily available online.
All I'm hearing is "there are some technical challenges". Of course there are. Keeping things sterile is basically not impossible. Nature is full of animals that figured out how to keep bacteria from rotting their bodies while they are still using them.
The conclusion related to cost is based on a very narrow understanding of the problem space and is only true if you stick with the article's assumptions and presumptions.
Future Meat Technologies apparently launched a facility that produces about 500 kilo of meat per day. That company has raised close to 46 million (according to Crunchbase). They are clearly still figuring a few things out. But you could see that scale a bit. From there it is just running the kilo price of meat against that and you can calculate revenue. Lets take beef for example. The kilo price of beef would be around 10$. So this facility produces about 5K worth of beef per day. Or about 1.8M per year. It's obviously a small research facility and not some mega facility. But it's been built by a company that invented the technology to do this and that then built this first factory. All on a budget of at most 50M$. I assume they've had a few false starts and that most of that budget went into R&D rather than building the factory that is alledgedly doing this. So, that factory is a lot cheaper than 50M$ probably.
This author says its never happening and Future Meat Technologies is launching their products in the US market next year. That can't both be true.
Add economies of scale, learning effects, etc. to the mix, and you get to quite profitable state quite soon. E.g. a facility that produces a few thousand kilos of beef per day selling it at 10$ per kilo, would be earning back Future Meat Technologies' investment to date every year. Doesn't sound that far fetched to me based on what they are already doing. The only questions are what would each facility cost to make and what would the running cost be for these facilities in terms of staffing and resources. This sounds to me like it's millions rather than billions.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but beyond taste/value arguments, there is an argument that the production of lab-grown meat is not able to reach significant scale with the available technology.
> And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, Good Food Institute (GFI)’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
> By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts.
> There’s another issue: In focusing on micronutrients as the primary cost driver, GFI may have underestimated the cost and complexity of providing macronutrients at scale. Just like other living animals, cultured cells will need amino acids to thrive. In Humbird’s projection, the cost of aminos alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef.
> "And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility ..."
> " cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions ..."
> "Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion ..."
The last sentence is clearly a mistake -- the 4,000 factories in total would cost $1.8 trillion. Thus replacing all meat with those would cost $18 trillion -- less than 20% of the world's GDP. So clearly feasible, but still not realistic.
According to the article there are no economics of scale. A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run. This is apparently a very difficult problem: "But the truth is this: For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years."
David Humbird's 2021 paper "Scale-up economics for cultured meat"[1] is a pretty damning study of the problems with lab-grown meat. His core conclusion: "Capital- and operating-cost analyses of conceptual cell-mass production facilities indicate economics that would likely preclude the affordability of their products as food."
Does anyone know if the problems that Humbird describes have somehow been solved?
> The meat industry is also cost effective due to massive government subsidies, at least in the US. Would these subsidies be available to lab grown meat operations?
Why would those subsidies matter when you're comparing a cow to a bioreactor? You can stick the cow in a dirty field and have hundreds of pounds of meat a few years later, as dirt-poor herdsmen with practically no captial have been doing for thousands of years. Its equivalent competitor would be a fussy bioreactor in a clean room that would require millions in capital, as well as high-end expertise and labor. Apparently the "food" is also ridiculously expensive.
As a big fan of the idea of manufacturing meat in an environmentally sustainable way (and without having to resort to raising and killing animals), reading this article felt as if someone was throwning a bucket's worth of ice-cold water on my face.
According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry.
Quoting from the OP:
> David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
Is there anyone on HN with deep expertise in this area who can comment on this article's scientific accuracy?
Along the same lines, people here are underestimating the scale of lab grown meat production. IIRC it'd have to be something like 40,000 factories costing close to $2T to build, and even then it would take decades to build them all. And the meat would be very expensive.
"According to the article, the barriers to cost-efficient manufacturing of lab-grown meat at large scale are fundamental, e.g., impossible to overcome according to the Laws of Thermodynamics and our current understanding of cell biology and chemistry."
I came away with the opposite understanding. I don't understand why lower cost lab grown meat would be fundamentally impossible. At its theoretical best, lab grown meat takes the existing non-lab grown situation and improves on it in two very important ways - less energy wasted growing non-meat, and less land required due to vertical farming capabilities. Rather, the issues I saw that the article talks about, such as issues maintaining sterile environments, aren't things that are theoretical limits, but are practical problems that might or might not have an eventual answer.
Correcting my comment here, the article apparently have a huge error: The 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility.. The article says this:
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
> Each of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator.
However, the link it is refering says this:
> According to CE Delft's techno-economic analysis, each factory could cost around $450m. A quick calculation suggests 4000 factories at this price would cost an eye-watering $1.8trn.
So the 1.8 trillion would be for 4000 facilities, not per facility. At that cost the investment to replace the worlds meat production would be worth 20 years of traditional meat farming, and then running cost above that. Significant but not unsurmountable as the article wanted to claim.
Wait, so you mean if you take linear projections of today's outputs and costs and extrapolate into the future it seems impossible? No shit. This is basically the case with every interesting technology project. There will no doubt have to be innovations in the approach, the equipment, etc. But in reality all we are talking about is mixing fluids and maintaining some temperatures. All of which is done at massive scale for chemicals, oil and gas, etc. I don't have strong claims to make regarding cultivated meat, but the kind of thinking behind this article is rampant. If the money is there, then this can no doubt be scaled up for far, far cheaper than the author envisions.
I work in industrial biotech, read the entire article and found it mostly compelling, aside from lacking discussion of the reasons meat production might increase in cost over the time frame of the analysis.
The fundamental challenge is not a lack of understanding - it seems to be mostly centered around keeping bacteria out of giant 100,000 Liter vats, and out of all of the smaller upstream processes.
Think of biotech as happening in successively larger tanks. Start in a vial, go up to a flask, go up to a tank fermenter, go up to a bigger and bigger vat. If competing bacteria get into your process at any of these steps or the transfers between them and start winning, you kill the batch and start over. And you probably take down your equipment for a deep clean as well. This takes you offline for some time. This is already a problem for fermentation of other bacterial cultures, but it’s an even bigger problem for animal cells because they grow so much slower. So there’s some lack of fundamental understanding on animal cell growth mechanisms.
Given how much attention has been focused during the pandemic on understanding how to limit the spread of germs, it seems to me that there may be some synergistic advancements in keeping large scale processes contamination-free. A lot of it is human factors.. operators using proper PPE etc. Now we have a global population that understands all of that better.. maybe that moves the baseline.
It’s not though. Lab grown meat requires several breakthroughs before it can possibly compete with cattle. Growing large amounts of meat in vats requires a clean environment, because the vats don’t have an immune system. All of the cells need to receive oxygen further complicating scaling and they still have to be fed. It’s a very complex and intensive process.
The part I dislike was focusing a lot on the size of the reactors needed in order to replace the US meat production. It is a bit unfair to compare the size of a bioreactor to a meat packing plant without considering the size of all the (organic?) bioreactors... livestock. There are ~30M cattle in the US at any given time so the volume is considerable. To ignore the infrastructure and space that livestock use is making the implicit claim that livestock are 'free' instead of 'cheaper currently'.
Considering how efficient meat production is (at the expense of everything else), we can basically make a single head of cattle as our standardized unit to evaluate the cost & thermodynamics.
Basically at scale is a engineered bioreactor cheaper than the natural blood & bones bioreactor? Certainly not upfront unless small scale bioreactor in a bag technology... oh wait that exists [1]. Sucks that pricing isn't easy to get but I think it is still more expensive than fixed/reusable vessels at least over time.
[1] https://www.sartorius.com/en/products/fermentation-bioreacto...
It's really hard to know without having more knowledge about the specifics of but I think there's a lot of unexplored areas that makes these projects worthwhile.
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