K A S H R U T . C O M_©

Crunch time for cultivated meat: ‘Probably 70-90% of players will fail in the next year’

November 20, 2023 from the AgFunder News:

"On paper, cultivated meat might seem like a no-brainer. Unlike plant-based options, which still don’t quite hit the spot for many consumers, it promises the allure of ‘real’ meat without the ethical and environmental baggage that comes with plundering our oceans and raising billions of sentient land animals for food.

"In practice, however, there’s no playbook for biomanufacturing meat at scale. The funding environment has changed dramatically as investors have soured on alt proteins, and we don’t know whether consumers will pay a premium once the novelty wears off.

"The media narrative around cultivated meat, which was universally positive a few years ago, has also changed dramatically over the past year: Articles about innovations in the space now compete with headlines about cancerous cells, greenwashing, vaporware, and business failures, against a backdrop of grim quarterly results from plant-based meat brand Beyond Meat.

"So, can cultivated meat make the transition from a loss-making novelty served at a handful of high-end restaurants to a commercially viable alternative to animal agriculture?

"However, it seems somewhat premature to write off an industry that didn’t even exist a decade ago because it can’t immediately compete with a heavily subsidized industry (industrialized animal agriculture) and associated ecosystem that has been scaling up and driving efficiencies for decades

"The price of cell culture media components will come down with economies of scale, he says, but what’s going to drive that scale in this chicken-and-egg situation the industry currently finds itself in?

"With current technologies, whole-cut products such as steaks present far greater technical challenges than unstructured products such as nuggets, concurs Swartz at the GFI, noting that UPSIDE Foods is still making its whole-cut chicken filets in two-liter flasks, which COO Amy Chen concedes is not currently scalable.

"However, its process for making unstructured products—growing cell biomass in far larger 2,000-liter tanks before combining it with plant proteins to make hybrid products—holds more promise (although UPSIDE is still awaiting regulatory approval on this process).

"According to Tetrick at GOOD Meat (Eat Just): “If someone says there are uncertainties around scaling up cultivated meat to tens of millions of pounds and getting below the cost of conventional chicken, beef or pork and lamb, I agree.”

"But that doesn’t mean that cultivated meat is a foodtech fantasy, he insists: “The first cell phone that came out was this big, bulky thing. And if someone had said eventually it’ll be a phone in your pocket with 10,000 songs and access to the internet, you’d have said that can’t be because we don’t have the processing speed or the internet connectivity to do that."