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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultivated meat

Cultivated Meat is On Sale, But It’s Pricey. A New Study Shows How to Bring the Cost Down

Now that the cultivated meat industry has achieved the long-awaited milestone of going on sale to consumers in the US, the focus will increasingly turn to whether it’s possible to make meat outside the animal more affordably. After all, it’s cool to make meat using a process that sounds straight out of pages of a science fiction novel, but most of us can’t afford to dine in restaurants run by some of the world’s most famous chefs.

So how do we go from prices that rival the world’s most expensive cuts of meat to a more approachable price per pound? According to a new techno-economic analysis (TEA) from bioreactor startup Ark Biotech, using current methods – in other words, with technology and processes primarily developed by a pharmaceutical industry where drugs can cost thousands of dollars per ounce – we can get to about $29.5 per pound for cultivated meat. That’s (kind of) progress, but when you consider that’s what you’d pay for a pound of filet mignon at a butcher, it’s clear that that price per cut will not cut it.

To navigate from filet mignon prices to something closer to that of ground chuck, Ark outlines four ways to do that in the analysis:

  1. Reduce the cost of media
  2. Improve biomass yields
  3. Optimize the bioprocess
  4. Reduce capital spend (depreciation), primarily through larger bioreactors

The TEA breaks down how much each lever currently contributes via the legacy production process:

From there, they analyze how to cost-optimize the price along all four cost levers:

Reduce the Cost of Media

Media is the most significant cost driver today. Ark believes that the price can be reduced by “decreasing media production costs (e.g., procurement, recipe), and (2) increasing the cell mass per unit of media (growing more meat with the same amount of media).” They also explore further cost reductions through other methods, including recycling media and developing ‘fit for purpose recipes’.

Improving Cell Mass

Increasing the cell density and growing more mass per liter of input is another way to decrease the overall cost per pound or, in other words, improve the overall production yield. Ark’s analysis goes into significant technical detail on how to do so, including by optimizing cell lines naturally or through genetic modification.

Optimizing the bioprocess

Another significant lever to reduce the overall cost of cultivated meat is to optimize the bio-production process, which means selecting the optimal mode in which nutrients are supplied to the cells in the bioreactor. According to Ark, there are four primary methods for providing nutrients to cells in the bioreactor (batch, fed-batch, perfusion, and continuous), and the choice of the technique involves tradeoffs in capital expense vs. ongoing cost of goods sold.

Bigger Bioreactors

The most significant capital expense in cultivated meat production is the bioreactor, those giant metal vats which grow cultivated meat. While larger bioreactors have larger price tags, the capital cost per unit of cultivated meat decreases as production volume increases. Factoring in that the costs of running a bioreactor are largely fixed, the short-short is that bigger bioreactors mean lower prices per pound of meat produced.

The analysis concludes that to get to pricing that approaches the commodified price of traditional ground beef, a combination of improvements (i.e., lever adjustments) is needed. Exhibit 1 shows how much progress each lever will contribute to reducing the cost per pound of cultivated meat.

It goes without saying that Ark has a significant amount of self-interest in arriving at these conclusions. Still, from what I can see, the analysis is a reasonably thoughtful assessment of what drives the costs of cultivated meat and where the industry needs to go to lower the price per pound.

Of course, they go into much greater detail in the full report, so I’d suggest those interested check it out.

The Spoon Weekly: The Edible Barcode

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For the last few years, there’s been lots of excitement about blockchain’s potential to finally bring end-to-end transparency to the food system. After all, once we have an incorruptible record of where food comes from, we’ll be able to track it from the time it leaves the farm until it arrives on our plate, right?

As it turns out, realizing the dream of registering our food on a decentralized ledger and getting everyone across the food system to use it is a lot harder than it sounds. Add to that the doubts that have surfaced over the past year-plus about blockchain and the broader crypto world, and web3 hasn’t really delivered on becoming the food transparency magic bullet.

But even before web3 stumbled, did it ever really have a chance to truly track our food throughout the food system? Except for maybe a cow here and there with a driver’s license, food commodities don’t usually come with digital ID cards that allow you to automatically identify its point of origin. In fact, over its lifetime, a grain of wheat may travel thousands of miles across a number of factories and kitchens until it lands on your plate. 

But what if you could insert the identification into the food itself, where the food has a unique identifier baked (or sprayed, or mixed) inside or onto that can be identified no matter where it goes along the food value chain? That’s the idea behind a form of digital tag from a company called Index Biosystems, which has developed what they call a form of invisible barcode in the form of baker’s yeast. 

The way it works is the company creates what they call a BioTag by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. From here, the BioTab becomes, in a sense, an invisible bar code that the company or one of its customers can read using molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing.

Index Biosystems isn’t the only company working on the idea of the invisible, integrated, and edible bar code. In 2020, a group of Harvard researchers wrote about their idea for an edible “bar code,” which they described as a scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution. According to the researchers, the spores would be identifiable for up to three months and multiple stops down the supply chain. The year before, SafeTraces announced they’d patented a system that took DNA strands drawn from seaweed that would turn into DNA bar codes readable throughout the food supply chain. 

DNA-powered identification systems are a compelling idea for a food world in which pathogens and food-borne illnesses have become a big problem. Companies early to this space (like SafeTraces) may have been a bit early, but now, as DNA identification systems have become commonplace and tools have become accessible by almost everyone, I have to wonder if the day has arrived for the embedded edible bar code. 

Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Andy Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

Check out the news (and how your’s truly is involved) over on The Spoon.

We’ve Added New Speakers for our Food AI Summit!

As you may have heard, this October we’re hosting the Food AI Summit, a new event focused on how AI will transform our food system. 

The conference, which will take place on October 25th in Alameda, California, will convene scientists, investors, entrepreneurs, and others who are building the future of food using AI together for a day of keynote talks, interactive sessions, product demonstrations, and networking. 

We’re continuing to build a great list of speakers, and this week we’ve added longtime food AI innovator Riana Lynn of Journey Foods. Lynn joins others like Jasmin Hume of Shiru, David Lee of Inevitable Tech, and Kevin Yu of SideChef. We’ve got more great speakers on the way, including maybe you! If you think you have an interesting insight or are building something that will change the world, feel free to fill out the speaker inquiry form and let us know!

Also, if you’d like to sponsor the event, we’d also like to hear from you as well! Just fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch.

And, of course, we’d love to see you in Alameda in October! Our Spoon community is the engine that makes our events and website go, and we are excited to connect with you IRL and talk about this exciting space! If you’d like to attend, we have a special discount just for newsletter subscribers. Just enter NEWSLETTER in the coupon code when buying a ticket for $100 off an early bird ticket. 

Check out The Food AI Summit Website. You can read the full announcement on The Spoon. 

The Consumer Kitchen

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

ARE YOU A SALES PRO WHO LOVES FOOD TECHNOLOGY?

If you have experience selling sponsorships for events and building multifaceted ad and brand campaigns for some of the world’s biggest food companies, we’d love to hear from you! A great opportunity to be involved in the world of food tech! Just drop us a line with a resume or link to your Linkedin, and we’ll be in touch!

Cultivated Meat

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’
 

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

Read the full story on The Spoon. 

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Read the full story on The Spoon.

Coffee Tech

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

Read about Ansā’s tech on The Spoon.

The Meataverse

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.

Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”

But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.

Read about Mike’s adventure in the Meataverse over at The Spoon. 

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

GOOD Meat invited van Eelen’s daughter Ira and his grandson Kick (both pictured above) to the tasting.

“I am grateful that a promise my father made decades ago has come true. I’m so happy we can stop talking about it and go eat it, because tasting is believing,” said Ira van Eelen. “This is the meat we love and trust, just made in a better way.”

The sale of GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken a day after his birthday was not the only synchronous event for the van Eelen family this week. On the same day, the government of his home country approved a ‘code of practice’ to allow tastings of cultivated meat to occur within tightly regulated environments.

Big Week For Cultivated Meat: Dutch Government Approves Tastings, UPSIDE’s Chicken Debuts at Crenn

It’s been an eventful few days for cultivated meat.

After getting the final regulatory green light from the USDA to serve cultivated meat to U.S. consumers, UPSIDE Food’s cultivated chicken showed up on menus for the first time this weekend at Bar Crenn. The event, hosted on Saturday, July 1st, marked the first time cultivated meat has gone on sale in the U.S.

Here’s how the special menu, prepared by famed French chef Dominique Crenn, was described by the press release sent to The Spoon: Diners at this historic meal were served UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken, fried in a Recado Negro-infused tempura batter and accompanied by a burnt chili aioli. Served in a handmade black ceramic vessel adorned with Mexican motifs and Crenn’s logo, the dish was beautifully garnished with edible flowers and greens sourced from Bleu Belle Farm. It reflects the global benefit that Chef Crenn sees in cultivated meat – with UPSIDE Chicken from the Bay Area in California, tempura from Japanese traditions, and an infusion of Recado Negro from Mexico’s Yucatan.

Just a few days later, on July 5th, the Dutch government approved a ‘code of practice’ to allow tastings of cultivated meat to occur within tightly regulated environments, an agreement that precedes the E.U. novel food approval. The code of practice was done in consultation with Dutch cultivated meat companies Mosa Meat and Meatable, along with HollandBIO.

This agreement makes the Netherlands the first country in the European Union to make pre-approval tastings of food grown directly from animal cells possible before a broader E.U. novel food approval. Cellulaire Agricultuur Nederland, a group created to implement a €60M award from the Dutch National Growth Fund, will be responsible for implementing the code of practice, which will include the hiring of an expert panel to evaluate requests by companies to conduct tastings of cultivated meat and seafood.

In many ways, 2023 is shaping up to be a critical year for cultivated meat, as governments seem to finally be comfortable with producing meat in giant metal vats. With approval in hand, companies like UPSIDE and Mosa Meat will continue to work on scaling up to larger production plants and creating lower-cost and ever-more climate-friendly techniques for producing meat in bioreactors.

Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat

Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers.

According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from the USDA that they have received a “grant of inspection” (GOI) from USDA, which means the company has met the applicable federal requirements and standards to operate as a meat establishment and is allowed to process, package, and sell our cultivated chicken in the United States under the inspection of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

UPSIDE says that with this news, they have passed all three of the requisite milestones necessary to sell its meat – 1) “No Questions” Letter from FDA — November 2022, 2) USDA Label Approval — June 2023, and 3) today’s GOI notification.

With the latest news, the company says they are starting manufacturing of meat and scaling up production at their EPIC facility. They plan to start selling the meat soon at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn through their partnership with 3-Michelin Star chef Dominique Crenn.

Not to be outdone, GOOD Meat – the cultivated meat division of Eat Just – plans to sell its first cultivated meat in the U.S. through a partnership with Chef José Andrés. According to the company, the sale of their cultivated meat product was greenlighted with the news that the USDA has given the company approval for its first poultry product to enter interstate commerce in the U.S. According to GOOD Meat, the sale of its product will take place at a yet-to-be-disclosed restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For GOOD Meat, the news marks the second country approval for the company will begin selling its cultivated meat product. The company achieved a global first in late 2020 by selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore.

Today’s news is truly a watershed event for the alt protein space. After billions of dollars spent across the industry for research and development, commercialization, and production, we will finally see the first cultivated products sold to U.S. consumers.

However, despite today’s news, everyday consumers may still have a bit of a wait. Cultivated meat products are still being made in small quantities and will first be sold in the most exclusive of restaurants, and it might be a while before we see it at the corner grocery store.

UPSIDE Foods Nabs USDA Label Approval for Cell-Cultivated Chicken

Cultivated meat company UPSIDE Foods announced today it had secured label approval from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its cultivated chicken product, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The approval comes half a year after the company became the first to get a GRAS green light for its cultivated meat from the USDA. The company becomes the second such company to receive approval after Good Meat (the cultivated meat division of Eat Just which secured their label on June 8th).

Cell-cultivated meat falls under the same USDA labeling requirements as traditional meat products, and the company’s USDA label approval shows its cultivated chicken is in full compliance with the governing agency’s pre-market labeling requirements. This means that post-inspection, UPSIDE’s chicken products will sport a USDA mark of inspection on their packaging. The USDA label will use the term “cell-cultivated chicken” to describe UPSIDE’s product to distinguish it from meat grown using traditional farming methods.

With label approval in hand, UPSIDE is working to secure the final regulatory step before the company can begin selling its cultivated meat to consumers, a Grant of Inspection (GOI) for its cultivated meat production facility, EPIC (short for Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center). Upon this final milestone, the company could move forward with commercial sales of its product. UPSIDE has previously announced it will first sell its chicken in the Bar Crenn restaurant in San Francisco. The company hasn’t indicated when it will receive its GOI but previously indicated it hopes to sell its cultivated meat to consumers this year.

With another win notched on its belt, UPSIDE continues to outpace most startups looking for US regulatory approval for its cultivated meat product. Undoubtedly, part of that success is attributable to the company’s regulatory affairs group, led by former FDA regulator (and food scientist) Eric Schulze. You can hear my conversation with Eric from 2021 on The Spoon Podcast below.

Extracellular To Offer License-Free & Low-Cost Cell Banks for Cultivated Meat Startups in the UK

Today Extracellular, a cultivated meat-focused contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), announced the availability of low-cost and license-free cell banks for research to cultivated meat developers in the UK. The banks of primary cells will be made available to early-stage cultivated meat researchers and startups via funding from StartupUK and through a collaboration with Mutus, another UK startup focused on low-cost inputs for cultivated meat growth media.

Animal primary cells relevant for cultivated meat research are typically not only expensive and often of poor quality, but usually have limited information about their performance or provenance. Their use is also limited due to stringent licensing and commercial agreement requirements. Extracellular aims to address these barriers by providing animal primary cells suitable for cultivated meat research and development at up to 90% cheaper than other cell line providers and free from licensing restrictions.

From the announcement:

The cell banks initially offer cells isolated from the fat, muscle, and bone marrow tissues of cow, pig and lamb. Information on the cells’ provenance, from the age, breed, and sex of the animal, to the passage numbers and expected population doubling times, will be included with each batch. More animal species and tissue types will be made available in the future.

This move comes as more researchers and activists in the cultivated meat and future food space call for more open access to shared resources to accelerate development. Startups in the cultivated meat space typically hold their intellectual property close to the vest, but as venture capitalists have become more reticent about the space, there’s a growing realization in the community that some level of open-source-ish behavior will be required if the industry to continue to move forward and ultimately make a meaningful contribution in reducing industrial agriculture and its associated climate impacts.

New Harvest’s Isha Datar, who has been pushing for open access to cell ag (her group launched OpenCellAg last summer in partnership with CULT Food Science), emphasized this in her comments on the initiative: “Despite the venture capital and startup environment, there are many fundamental aspects of cellular agriculture that can (and must) be solved collectively. The efforts of Will Milligan and the team at Extracellular to share resources at low cost to equip and empower researchers to build a body of work is commendable leadership. In the near term, we need to go beyond traditional academia to build foundational work in this space; this type of initiative from the private sector is exactly what cellular agriculture needs. We need a culture of sharing and open science if we are to move this field forward. Too much depends on it.”

Cell banks will be made available starting next month to UK-based startups.

World’s Biggest Meat Packer JBS Building Cultivated Meat Plant Capable of 1,000 Metric Tons

Lab-grown meat is all grown up.

This week Brazilian meat processing conglomerate JBS announced they had broken ground in Spain on its first commercial-scale cultivated meat production facility. According to the company, the new facility will produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year, potentially expanding to 4,000 metric tons of production in the medium term, according to Reuters.

The new facility will be built by BioTech Foods, the packing giant’s Spanish subsidiary which the company acquired a 51% stake in 2021. In that $100 million deal, $41 million was earmarked for the production of the facility, which will be built in the heart of Spain’s culinary epicenter in San Sebastian.

While the facility is not the biggest cultivated meat factory in the world that’s been announced – that honor goes to (at least for now) Good Meat’s future facility, which they claim will produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat – the JBS facility looks like it could be the biggest in Europe. While Gourmey’s plant announced last year looks like it will have a fairly massive physical footprint, the company has only vaguely alluded to a production capacity in the “10s of thousands of pounds” in cultivated meat. If JBS’s facility hits its initial production capacity target of one thousand metric tons, that pencils out to over two million pounds of cultivated meat annually. Expanding to its planned four thousand metric tons will mean 8.8 million pounds.

In reality, the actual pounds don’t matter so much as the symbolic nature of this move by the world’s biggest meatpacker. Also, considering that JBS is investing so heavily in cultivated meat just after the company closed its plant-based meat production facility in Denver, it’s a pretty bullish sign for a technology that has seen a rising chorus of critiques in recent months around its viability and climate impact claims.

BioTech Foods co-founder and CEO Iñigo Charola points to the instability around traditional ag supply chains as the impetus for JBS investing heavily in a cultivated meat future.

“With the challenges imposed on global supply chains, cultivated protein offers the potential to stabilize food security and global protein production,” Charola said in a statement.

All grown up, indeed.

New Study Claims Cultivated Meat’s Current Path Is Significantly Worse for Environment Than Beef

A new life-cycle analysis by researchers at UC Davis has concluded that the current path of the cultivated meat industry’s commercialization process is potentially orders of magnitude worse for the environment than beef produced through animal agriculture, producing anywhere from 4 to 25 times more CO2 than traditionally produced beef.

The analysis, which at this point has not been peer-reviewed, stands in stark contrast to previous life cycle analysis (LCA) studies that have concluded the environmental impact of cell-cultivated meat – which the study calls “animal cell-based meat” or ACBM – is significantly less than that of traditionally produced beef. However, according to the new research, the problem with previous LCAs is that they do not accurately represent the environmental impact of the current technologies being used in the assumption sets for forecasts within the techno-economic models.

In particular, the study (which was first written about in IFL Science) says the significant environmental impact associated with the purification required of growth medium has not been fully accounted for in previous studies. According to the UC Davis researchers, these previous studies had “high levels of uncertainty in their results and a lack of accounting” for what they believe is the necessary endotoxin removal required for growth media. Accounting for the required purification is essential say the study’s authors, and they believe that the fossil fuel needed for purified growth medium components using the current anticipated commercialization process is anywhere between 3 and 17 times that of the reported “high” scenario for that of traditional boneless beef production.

While the researchers state their study is more accurate than previous LCAs that didn’t accurately model the cost of the production of the purified growth medium, they go on to say that is because the cost built into these techno-economic models is based on current systems being developed for the near-term commercialization of ACBM. They say that the industry would be better off as a whole if some of the key issues were solved before the industry focused on commercial scaling, such as developing a more “environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal” or “the development of a technological innovation that allows for the use of an inexpensive animal cell growth media produced from agricultural by-products.”.

“Perhaps a focus on advancing these precompetitive scientific advances might lead to a better outcome for all,” they write.

It needs to be stressed again that this paper has not been peer-reviewed, so until it has been evaluated by other subject matter experts in cell ag life cycle analysis in the research community, we should caution against pulling the alarm around the potential impact of the current path towards commercialization. At the same time, the report’s authors, such as Dr. Justin Siegel, have impressive resumes and a history of publication that indicates they likely wouldn’t put their name behind such a controversial conclusion if they didn’t believe it would hold up under scrutiny.

My guess is the conclusion in this study will cause a significant ripple of interest and could have a potentially significant impact on this industry if the findings are considered valid by the broader scientific community. Most of the currently venture-funded cultivated meat startups say they are working on technologies that will lower the costs of cultivated meat, but it’s unclear if any of them have identified ways to remediate the challenges identified by this study’s authors in the current path towards commercialization of ACBM.

We’ll follow the reactions to this study from those in the scientific community – and by extension, the investment community – over the next few months.

Are Cultivated Meat Forecasts Accurately Modeling In Misinformation Risk?

Last week, GFI published their annual state of the industry reports for the three major alt-protein technology ‘pillars’, plant-based meat, fermentation, and cultivated meat (and teased a fourth one).

Like many, I find the reports invaluable, as they are a good synthesis of the current scientific, regulatory, investment, and product evolution across the spaces.

The reports include an analysis of various industry forecasts, aggregating outlooks from research houses, industry analysts, and financial analysts. These forecasts for the alternative protein sector span over three decades and range from fairly conservative (Jeffries at ~$90 billion in 2040) to some bordering on wildly optimistic (Credit Suisse’s high forecast at $1.1 trillion in 2050).

As a former industry analyst, I appreciate the difficulty of forecast modeling future industries, especially ones that, like the alternative protein market, are still early stages. Each of the three alt-protein pillars falls into slightly different states of their evolutionary development: Plant-based meat can still be described as being in an early market phase, and newer forms of fermentation-based alt-proteins (such as precision fermentation) are still mostly nascent. Cell-cultured proteins, with the exception of some early trial rollouts, are still mostly non-existent on store shelves as of early 2023.

Market forecasting models inherently involve assumptions about various industry growth factors and inhibitors. In the report, GFI summarizes a few common forecast assumptions:

  • Taste and price parity are essential.
  • Consumer adoption is a limiting factor to market growth.
  • Innovation brings more innovation, investment brings more investment.

While GFI examines each in detail, I am mainly going to focus here on consumer adoption as a limiting factor to market growth. It is self-evident that a market requires consumers, and if they don’t adopt a product, there is no one to sell to.

In the cultivated meat market report, GFI opens its analysis of this assumption with the following:

Most alternative protein market forecasts see growth as dependent on consumers wanting and buying alternative protein products, with market penetration naturally following. Jefferies, for example, identifies consumer tastes and adoption as key drivers of market growth, and Boston Consulting Group states that growth relies on consumers being convinced of taste, texture, and price competitiveness in relation to conventional meat.

So far so good. I think Jefferies is correct in that consumer tastes and adoption are key to growth, and BCG is also right in that consumers must perceive the taste, texture, and price of these products as being on par to animal-based products. GFI acknowledges that consumer taste perception and overall adoption are important but adds that it is also critical for the industry to achieve the scale needed to meet consumer demand, which is closely related to pricing, given that price is largely a factor of supply and demand.

However, what the GFI report and the various publicly available writeups from BCG or Jefferies do not attempt to assess or quantify is the increased risk to the alternative protein industry from industry and product-related misinformation. Misinformation refers to conspiracy theories, half-truths, and purposefully misleading information propagated daily on social media. Those against newer forms of protein are rapidly increasing the volume of misinformation.

Here’s an example from this week:

The tweet above – which has been retweeted 10 thousand times and viewed a million times – features a false headline from a site (People’s Voice TV) that is known to traffic in misinformation. The article refers to an article in a publication called Naturalnews.com, which is loosely based on a piece in Bloomberg (which itself has been panned) about the use of what are called immortalized cells by prominent cell-cultured meat startups like UPSIDE and Eat Just. While the Bloomberg article doesn’t say anywhere in it that these cells have been proven to cause cancer, that didn’t stop People’s Voice TV or tens of thousands of people on Twitter from spreading the false narrative that these products cause cancer and – somehow – that Bill Gates is involved as some part of a large-scale conspiracy to exert control through… a new form of meat.

Does not analyzing the rise of misinformation about the industry and its products make the analysis by GFI or the industry analyst reports they cite bad? Not really. Traditional forecast models factor in basic assumptions around growth drivers and inhibitors and often look to existing market analogs, such as the traditional meat industry in this case, to make assumptions about potential market size, cannibalization, replacement, etc.

However, by not addressing them, I believe industry experts are underplaying the potential for this industry, particularly the cell-cultured meat market, to become stillborn. All one has to do is look at the significant impact of the wave of misinformation on COVID-19 vaccines to recognize the potential that misinformation (or disinformation) could have on cell-cultured meat. Much of the language used by those criticizing culvivated meat is reminiscent of some of the wildest anti-vax conspiracies, often sharing the same anti-science or “evil funder” tropes.

While I don’t have an exact answer for how they should account for the impact, I’d point to other types of risk analysis frameworks employed by industries and organizations to quantify future risks. Cybersecurity or national defense security frameworks are often focused on cataloging all potential risks to an organization or enterprise. One example of the type of risk assessment model is the one created by NIST, the US Department of Commerce for information security risk assessment.

This is just one example. There are many others, often focused on IT or national defense risk, that have defined ways to assess and quantify risk. Many of them are built to actually derive a number, in the form of lost enterprise or monetary value, for an organization based on risks.

In the NIST framework, they look to identify all potential threat sources and events, identify an organization or industry’s vulnerabilities, determine how likely they are to happen, the magnitude of impact, and then assess the risk. If this were applied to the case of alternative proteins, it would be relatively easy to work through this framework and identify a number of risks of misinformation from a variety of sources. Whether it’s organized groups such as traditional animal agriculture trade groups, politically motivated actors trying to catalyze sympathy towards a cause, or just social media influencers spreading misinformed memes, it’s best to recognize where misinformation is originating and to use risk analysis to prepare and inoculate yourself against it.

Some in this space have told me that they don’t want to give these types of tropes oxygen; therefore, it’s best to ignore them. While I can see their point, I’m not sure ignoring them is the best strategy for long-term survival. Social media has a way of providing oxygen to bad information, and so the best response is to recognize threats early and develop strategies for dealing with them. While I don’t have all the answers, I think advocates for alternative proteins need to be prepared for the coming wave of misinformation, and the best way to do that is to try to calculate its impact and develop strategies for dealing with it head-on.

CULT Scoops Up Assets From Cultivated Meat Pet Food Startup Because Animals, Fresh Off Investment By Marc Lustig

This week CULT Food Sciences announced it had signed a binding letter to acquire some of Because Animals Inc.’s consumer brand assets, related patents, non-scientific intellectual property, and product formulations.

The acquisition of some of the assets of Because Animals, one of the first startups dedicated to creating pet food using cultivated meat, comes just weeks after CULT announced that Canadian entrepreneur, Marc Lustig, had acquired 15% of the company through the purchase of 27 million shares of CULT. With the deal, Lustig, a cannabis industry executive who sold his company Origin House for $1.1 billion in 2019, becomes CULT’s biggest shareholder. While the terms of Lustig’s investment were undisclosed, 27 million shares of CULT tallied to about ~$2 million based on CULT’s stock price at the time.

While it’s unclear if the two deals were connected, what is clear is the move to bring some of Because Animals’ IP into the fold has been in the works for some time, as it follows the announcement in November that Because Animals’ cofounder, Joshua Errett, was appointed as CULT’s VP of Product. Errett is one of the inventors behind some of the key patents for the company.

With the move, CULT, which describes itself as a company focused on the investment, development, and commercialization of cellular agriculture technologies and products, will expand its products into the pet food space. The company, which also has investments in a variety of different cellular agriculture-based startups, has already launched consumer-facing products such as cell-based coffee and candy.

The terms of the deal involve Further Foods Inc., a subsidiary of CULT, acquiring the assets from Joshua Errett in exchange for a USD$500,000 promissory note bearing interest at 4.35% and an initial 10% ownership stake in Further. Additional ownership stakes in Further will be issued to the vendor based on revenue generated by the assets after the closing of the transaction.

“Eliminating factory-farmed meats in the foods we feed our companion animals will have wide-ranging effects on our society, with ripples through our food chain, economy, and of course, environment,” Errett said in the announcement. “We can reimagine our entire food system, starting with what we put under our dogs’ and cats’ noses every day. I am personally devoted to this cause, as today’s announcement makes clear. I’m looking forward to continuing my important work on this amazing brand.”

But Wait a Minute…

While some of Because Animals’ assets are being sold to CULT, the remaining founder of Because Animals,  Shannon Falconer, made it clear that the company is still a going concern and is still focused on creating cultivated meat-powered pet food.

Falconer and Because Animals sent the following statement to The Spoon, Green Queen and others:

“Cultured meat is what our customers and future manufacturing partners have been asking us for, and this is what we’re prioritizing. The company’s strength is our scientific prowess, and since scientific innovation is key to bringing cultured meat to market, we made the decision to apply laser focus to achieving that feat and to divest ourselves of any and all non-core assets that were not required to realize that objective.” 

“We were surprised to see the announcement by CULT Food Science ‘CULT Food Science Announces Binding Letter of Intent to Acquire Because Animals Consumer Brands and Formulations’ as CULT was at no point involved in our divestiture, nor was Because Animals contacted by CULT prior to their publication. Although it’s not clear from their press release, the consumer brand ‘Because Animals’ was not acquired.” 

“Because Animals retains all of its intellectual property relating to cultured meat – which is our core business – and we are committed to revolutionizing the pet food industry with this technology.”

Because Animals said in the statement the assets heading to CULT were nutritional yeast-based products it discontinued in late 2022. It was these product formulations for these products and two provisional patents related to the discontinued products it agreed to sell Errett. 

A Tale of Two Startups: Why Cultivated Meat is So Close (And Yet so Far) From Disrupting Animal Ag

Last week, two contrasting stories painting very different pictures emerged from the cultivated meat industry.

The first highlighted the news that GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat arm of Eat Just, had received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cultivated meat product. This makes the company the second to gain FDA approval after UPSIDE Foods, demonstrating the industry’s proximity to finally bringing meat produced outside of animals to consumers.

The other news came from the founder of New Age Eats, Brian Spears, who announced the company’s closure in a LinkedIn post. According to Spears, the company was far from generating revenue, and due to recent retrenchment from venture investors, it failed to raise the necessary funds to continue.

From his post:

In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.

While the stories each tells are very different, together they underscore the precarious nature of this emerging industry. On one hand, the cultivated meat industry is tantalizingly close to commercializing a business with considerable potential to help end the cruel and environmentally damaging industrial animal agriculture industry. On the other hand, it reveals that creating meat in bioreactors involves a long, challenging, and highly capital-intensive journey that will likely see many early pioneers fail or be acquired by competitors before ever selling a product.

When I talked with Po Bronson, the managing director of IndieBio, back in November, he predicted that this year would see many companies struggle to raise their next round of funding and seek buyers.

“What I think we’re going to see here is markets constrict,” Bronson said on the Spoon Podcast. “They already are constricting right now. And you’re going to see a lot of companies unable to raise their next round.”

Of course, the difficulty of raising money isn’t unique to cultivated meat companies. Pretty much every category of startup is beginning to feel the pressure nowadays, a pressure no doubt made even more acute with the recent demise of SVB. But unlike many startup categories, cultivated meat has a particularly difficult problem in that the industry has a much longer road toward revenue than many of these industries.

In fact, while many companies like GOOD Meat and UPSIDE are already pretty far down the path towards commercializing this business, the amount of production capacity available to even the most well-funded and commercially mature cultivated meat startups is still just a tiny fraction of what they will eventually need to start producing meat to make even a small dent in traditional animal agriculture. To achieve mass-production scale, billions more will be needed to expand production capacity, develop cost-effective commercialization processes and technology, and educate consumers about this new form of meat.

This is why organizations like the Good Food Institute and the startups themselves have started advocating for government funding to assist with late-stage capital. In its latest outlook on the investment landscape for alternative proteins, GFI cited investment in the electric vehicle market as a potential model for the alt protein sector:

While global public investment in alternative proteins is growing, it is a drop in the bucket compared to other public climate investments. For example, global governments committed $500 billion to renewable energy development in 2022. The United States alone committed $7.5 billion last year to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. To realize a sustainable, secure, and equitable protein production system, governments must increase their commitments to alternative proteins, and the current market provides an opportunity to do so. 

I think this is the right thing to do, but I’m unsure how fast we’ll see similar dollar amounts flow from the U.S. government, especially given how entrenched traditional animal agriculture is as a political force. While billions in government subsidies are certainly a possibility, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion, and most likely not something we’ll see in the next couple of years.

Where does this leave the cultivated meat industry? In the near term, we’ll see accelerating industry consolidation. Early startups with promising technology in creating a particular type of cultivated meat will get acquired, as some of the bigger companies start to roll up technology to fast-track their efforts. We’ll also see more “full stack” companies that have the different pieces of the puzzle – multiple cell lines, enabling infrastructure, sustainable and FBS-free growth media technology – as they acquire assets that come on the market at prices well below what they cost to build.

We’ll see fewer early-stage startups with intentions to create their own cultivated meat funded, and what investment dollars are left for this space will increasingly go to those building enabling technology to help accelerate the process. Over the past year, we’ve already seen more companies building pick-and-shovel technology like bioreactors, scaffolding, and growth media becoming the primary focus for investors.

Long term, the industry will need a combination of enough industry proof points and success stories to reassure investors they’ll get a return on their investment and to possibly convince the government to allocate significant resources. Unlike the electric vehicle industry, which saw mass-produced E.V.s start rolling off the production lines before President Obama pledged $2.4 billion in grants towards the industry, the cultivated meat industry is probably a decade away from mass-market production.

Still, hope shouldn’t be lost. The collective goal of these companies is too important to give up on, and while the era of easy capital is over, I think we’ll see some companies emerge from these tough times with products that will touch millions of consumers.

But the ride will definitely be bumpy.