You can’t say Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown is a flip-flopper when it comes to downplaying the future of cell-based meat. At our Smart Kitchen Summit in October of last year, Brown declared that cultured meat was “never going to be a thing,” and based on a Washington Post interview that ran this morning, he’s only strengthened his resolve over the past nine months.
In a Q&A, Post reporter Laura Reilly asked Brown whether he thought the labeling battles currently being fought over plant-based meat will repeat with cell-based meat. Brown responded:
Cultivated meat is complete vaporware. Don’t hold your breath. The fact is that the economics of animal cell cultures as a food production system in no conceivable way can compete with the current industry. If you could use cultured cells to make any reasonable replica of an animal tissue, which would you do: Sell it for $5 a pound as meat, or sell it for $1 million a pound to treat people with muscle-wasting diseases?
It’s actually hard to make a reasonable facsimile of an animal tissue from cultured cells. Theoretically it’s doable, and there’s no question that it will be done at some point. But it will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food.
He went on to make an analogy about transportation and recreating a horse instead of building a car. His point being, trying to recreate existing animal meat means your stuck with the same limitations of those animals. Both points are pretty much the same arguments he made at SKS last year, but what’s interesting is that so many advances have happened in the cultured meat space since that time.
Perhaps the biggest milestone hit was that cultured meat is being sold to consumers. Sure, right now it’s just one company (GOOD Meat) selling it in one country (Singapore), but people are actually consuming cultivated meat right now. They’re even getting it delivered to their homes.
We’ve also seen a ton of investment in the cultured meat space, funding a range of startups tackling a variety of issues. The aforementioned GOOD Meat raised $170 million, Aleph Farms just raised $105 million, Misson Barns raised $24 million, and Meatable raised $47 million, just to name a few.
At the same time we’ve seen some companies drastically bring down the costs of their cultured products. Mosa Meat generated more than a 65x cost reduction in the creation of its cultured fat. Future Meat has reduced the production price of its cultured chicken breast twice this year, bringing it down to $4 per 110g serving. And Avant Meats said it has achieved a 90 percent reduction in the cost of producing its cultured functional proteins.
And finally, just this month, it was reported that CPG giant Nestlé has partnered with Future Meat to develop some type of plant-based/cultivated meat hybrid product. If this bears out, having a massive company like Nestlé involved could definitely push the cultivated meat sector forward and closer to a reality for consumers.
As the CEO of Impossible Foods, which has raised $1.6 billion in funding and is in the plant-based meat business, Brown obviously has a horse in this race. Part of his poo-pooing cultured meat is protecting his company, and part of it is generating headlines and discussion. He’s right to have some skepticism, cultivated meat still needs to reach price parity with animal meat, regulations need to be created in markets around the world, and we need to see if consumers will even want “lab-grown” meat. But doubling down on the exact same arguments against cultivated meat year after year, when so many obvious advances have been made, seems to just deny the reality of an evolving situation.
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