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cultured meat

June 21, 2021

Japan’s CulNet Consortium, an ‘Open Innovation Platform’ for Cell-Based Meat, Officially Launches

Last week a group of Japan-based companies announced the official launch of the CulNet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. The announcement, made by Japan cell-based meat startup IntegriCulture, details the member companies and outlines the activities of the group.

The group’s platform is centered around an open innovation framework developed by IntegriCulture, one of Japan’s most visible and active startups in cellular agriculture. The Uni-CulNet framework and the Consortium plans were originally announced in May of 2020, when IntegriCulture described the framework as “a standardized cellular agriculture infrastructure” that “rapidly establishes the foundation for democratized cellular agriculture.”

The consortium’s member companies plan to cooperate across five different areas to help accelerate the sector’s overall advancement: cell source, culture medium, CulNet hardware, product bioreactor, and product processing.

From the release:

  • Standardized culture media: Recipes that are fundamentally different from the existing media (basal media). Basal media are the raw material for all cultured cell products, and a different type is required for each kind (food, material, medical, etc.).
  • CulNet SystemTM hardware: Hardware that lets people use the CulNet SystemTM across a broad spectrum of uses, whether it’s in mass production or just at home.
  • Product bioreactors: Bioreactors that are used to make things like the products’ edible parts. We estimate that a variety of animals used as agricultural products will be a source for the cells.
  • Cell product processing: The process control that is needed to meet the products’ processing and safety requirements (cell components and culture supernatant).
  • Cell sources: The process that is used to extract and culture cells from livestock and fishery resources and the systems that enable the whole sequence of processes to be completed right where the cell sources are produced—tailoring them to their intended use, source animal species, etc.

It’s not surprising IntegriCulture and its founder Yuki Hanyu are a driving force behind a standardization push around open innovation. Hanyu has been the most visible evangelist for cell-based meat in Japan over the last few years, and his company’s ethos for open innovation was signaled by the efforts he put into building a DIY cultured meat initiative with the Shojinmeat project.

The CulNet Consortium isn’t the only industry organization gaining momentum as the cell-based meat industry matures. The Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood Innovation (AMPS Innovation), an industry group focused on market education and industry advocacy, just announced an eighth member, Orbillion Bio, who joins Eat Just, Upside and Blue Nalu, among others. AMPS has been working to influence US policy to support the cultured meat industry, including a recent joint industry letter to the FDA after its call for input into the labeling framework for cell-based meat.

June 7, 2021

South Korea: Seawith Uses Algae for Serum and Scaffolding in Cultured Meat

It’s been a banner year so far for cultured meat. In addition to all of the funding that’s been flowing into the space since the start of 2021, there is also a growing number of startups from around the world attacking the issues of creating cell-based meat in unique ways.

The latest such startup to come to our attention is South Korea’s Seawith, which is leveraging algae to differentiate itself from other cultured meat players. The company uses algae to replace the fetal bovine serum (FBS) that has historically been used as a growth medium for cells. FBS is expensive and controversial, so most cell-based meat startups we cover are developing technologies that don’t require it. But Seawith is also using algae as a scaffolding to grow meat, which the company says yields thicker “cuts” of meat.

Following is a brief Q&A conducted via email with Heejae Lee, CTO of Seawith, who provides a little more insight into the company and what it is creating. Answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

1.) What makes Seawith different from other cell-based meat companies?
Seawith has the distinction of making the world’s first perfect steak at a price similar to slaughter meat. Based on algae engineering technology, it has replaced most of the bovine serum, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the cost of culturing meat, and the cell culture scaffold technology can make cultured meat thicker than 1cm.

2.) What makes algae so useful in creating cell-based meat?
The key principle of cultured meat is that one muscle cell takes nutrients and synthesizes them to make large meat. Algae is rich enough to be used as a nutritional supplement, which allows efficient cell culture by supplying it to cells. Also, algae are one of the most abundant resources on Earth, and they have the advantage of being cheap and available everywhere because they can grow anywhere with water and sunlight.

3.) Where are you at with your product right now?
We just finished our research and held a cultured meat tasting event. Cultured meat made with Korean bovine cells was evaluated well by attendees, who said it had the taste and aroma of beef, and the texture of meat could be seen. Currently, it is a muscle-only culture, but we are preparing various features such as taste of fat cells. We are preparing to get permission to produce enough to supply large quantities of products to restaurants by 2023.

4.) What types of cell-based meat will you be creating?
Seawith is making beef steak. There are many different types of meat, but the reason why we are making
difficult steaks is that only the technology we have can implement them. After perfecting the texture of muscle tissue, we plan to develop various meat products such as chicken, pig, and fish as well as meat products and animal feed.

5.) What is your timeline to bring your product to market?
We are currently discussing with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to make a trial sale in Korea with the aim of
launching a restaurant at the end of 2022. To this end, we are planning an urban cultured meat factory and will introduce a minimum production model by 2021. From 2023, we are preparing for local tasting event and product launch in different locations such as North America and Singapore.

May 27, 2021

Magic Valley Wants to Bring Cultivated Lamb to Market in a Couple Years

Australian cultivated meat company Magic Valley this week proclaimed itself “the world’s first cultured lamb company” and provided some details on what it’s been up to since its recent launch. The company is currently in prototype stage and in the process of raising seed funding.

As a meat choice, lamb stands out in a world where the majority of cultivated meat companies are busy making beef, chicken, and pork analogues. In the U.S., lamb consumption has been on the decline since the 1960s, though consumption worldwide is actually expected to rise slightly. Growth is predicted to be the highest in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Lamb production is similar to other forms of livestock production in terms of the land and water resources required to supply demand. Cultivated lamb, created by taking cells from a lamb and growing them in a nutrient-rich medium, addresses the problem of resources when it comes to developing a more sustainable end product. Magic Valley says it uses pluripotent stem cells, otherwise known as “master cells” that can create endless copies of themselves. The company does not use Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), the expensive and highly controversial growth medium many cultivated meat companies are moving away from at this point. 

To start, the Melbourne-based company said that its focus for now is on developing cultivated lamb products, including mince, strips, steaks, and, and chops. 

Lamb is typically more expensive to buy than chicken or beef, so one major challenge for Magic Valley (and any other company hoping to develop a cultivated version) will be reaching price parity with that traditional lamb meat. There is also the ever-present question of what happens to the livelihoods of livestock producers if and when cultivated meat scales enough to feed global consumers en masse. Some have argued that traditional meat producers are actually a critical part of the evolution of cultivated meat, and that these groups could invest in bioreactors to grow meat right on the farm, becoming hybrid farmers of traditional and cultivated meat.

Answers to some of those questions are yet a long ways off. Nearer term, most cultivated meat companies are just trying to get to market in some capacity. Magic Valley has no direct competitors right now, since it’s the only known company currently developing cultivated lamb. However, another Australian company, Vow, specializes in “exotic” cultured meats and is currently amassing a cell library that includes everything from water buffalo to kangaroo. Lamb may very well end up in that cell library one of these days. 

Magic Valley, meanwhile, hopes to complete its prototype and have products on shelves within one to two years.

May 23, 2021

Transcript: Excerpts From a Recent Conversation With Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick

By “in the future,” he didn’t mean next year. Anyone who keeps an eye on the cultivated meat industry knows there are many, many hurdles to leap before we’re eating cultivated Big Macs. For companies actually making the products and/or accompanying technologies, there’s still much to do around improving growth media, bioprocess design, and many other things. And, of course, more companies must get regulatory approval to sell in more countries.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned shift towards cultivated meat is happening. Restaurants are a major part of that process, as is the task of educating consumers about what cultivated meat actually is (“It doesn’t taste like meat. It is meat”) and why the heck we need it in the first place.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the transcript of my conversation with Tetrick below. And if you missed our weekly newsletter discussing the topic, go here to read the web version of it.

May 23, 2021

Delivery Has a Small But Vital Role When it Comes to Normalizing Cultivated Meat

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Setting aside scalability, price parity, and regulatory approvals for a moment, one of the major challenges for cultivated meat makers will be getting people to actually buy their products en masse and on a regular basis.

We’ve written before about restaurants being a critical step in this journey, and after this week, I would add restaurant delivery to that process, too. The industry-wide shift to delivery wrought by the pandemic forced the restaurant biz to get pretty creative in terms of what it can do with delivery. Similar energy could be put towards delivering consumers an entire education about cultivated meat, not just a meal in a box.

There’s currently only one company in the world that’s even allowed to sell cultivated meat in restaurants right now — Eat Just, which nabbed the first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat at the end of 2020 and subsequently started selling its GOOD chicken product at Singapore restaurant 1880. The San Francisco-based Eat Just has since struck a deal with Delivery Hero’s food panda service to deliver meals from 1880. This week, Eat Just announced (among other things) that it is doing something similar with JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan restaurant. To start, GOOD chicken dishes will only be available from Madame Fan with delivery orders.

When I talked to Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick this past week, he was admittedly a little more blasé about delivery than I’m being at the moment: “It just was kind of as simple as, ‘It’d be nice if people could eat meat without slaughter in their homes. So let’s do delivery.'” Delivery Hero happens to be an investor in Eat Just, and food panda happens to be one of Asia’s biggest delivery services. Those convenient factors made delivery something of a no-brainer for the company to pursue.

But Tetrick also pointed out that delivery is part of the overall process of getting cultivated meat out of the lab and onto our plates. “Start with regulatory approval,” he said. “Then it’s getting on a menu. Then it’s having a family sit down and have a chicken dinner together. Then you can go to a retailer and buy [it]. All these things create a context in which this idea of making meat — which seemed like it was some futuristic thing a year ago — suddenly becomes a way that people just eat meat.”

Restaurants have historically played a role in the evolution of what we eat. But thanks to the forces at work, both technological and pandemic-related, restaurants are no longer just in-person experiences between the four walls of a dining room. If there was one idea that’s been dissected ad infinitum over the last year, it’s that the word “restaurant” now encompasses a far wider range of experiences. One of the biggest is delivery.

The pandemic accelerated rather than created delivery’s popularity, which means as a meal format, it won’t go by the wayside anytime soon. Numbers may taper off a bit as the world reopens, but many consumers have already said they will continue to order delivery on a regular basis. That makes it an integral part of the restaurant industry that anyone looking to enter the biz needs to pay attention to. Like cultivated meat companies.

If we go by the example Eat Just/GOOD have set, that involves more than putting some lab-grown chicken bites in a cardboard box. Tetrick said that delivery for the Madam Fan deal will operate similar to what his company did with its original 1880/food panda deal. Customers can choose from a few different dishes (chicken and rice, katsu curry, etc.). Meals are delivered to customers along with a Google Cardboard viewer and a link to a 360-degree short film about meat. Tetrick described the film as follows:

“You you put the glasses on and you’re in the midst of a rain forest in South America. Then it transitions to the rain forests being removed, and you see that it’s connected to planting lots of soy and corn. And you see how the soy and corn is connected to feed going to animals, and you see how that’s connected to your plate and how we could do something different.”

The point is to help consumers familiarize themselves with the term “cultivated meat” and explain why it matters for the health of the plant (more food made with fewer resources) and how that big-picture context fits into each individual consumer’s life, whether they’re in Singapore or Tennessee.

Longer term, immersive experiences like the above could help with what’s something of an end game for cultivated meat: getting people to think of it as just meat. Not “lab-grown meat” or “slaughter-free” meat or any of the other descriptors floating around nowadays. Just regular ol’ meat from regular ol’ animals.

It’s significant, then, that Eat Just’s deal with Madame Fan will deliver cultivated meat that actually replaces its conventional counterpart on the menu. In future, says Tetrick, restaurant menus will still offer some plant-based options (for those who can’t eat animals for ethical and/or religious reasons). But in his mind, “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have both cultivated meat and conventional meat on the menu.”

“I think you’ll end up having restaurants all across the world transition,” he added.

Not tomorrow, mind you. As I write this, global demand for meat is up. There is also a huge difference between letting someone taste something as a one-off experience and getting them to order it on a regular basis. As more companies attempt to scale up — often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — they will need to start educating their prospective consumers on what the heck this stuff is and why we need it in the first place. Choosing the right restaurant partners and getting the actual chefs involved will be important for this, too, as well sending the right messaging to each different demographic.

Food delivery may be one small step in this process, but given its ubiquity right now, it’s a crucial one to get right.

Elsewhere in the Restaurant Biz . . .

Top Three Takeaways from Our Food Robotics Summit – The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht gives some thought to the future of robots, including restaurant robots, in his wrap-up from our latest event.

Take on Big Pizza by Supporting Bitcoin – An investor/entrepreneur has launched Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. Proceeds in part go towards supporting independent restaurants.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital – The on-demand payment service for restaurants and retailers has secured $500 million in capital and will use it to expand to new markets.

May 17, 2021

Mosa Meat Achieves an ‘Over 65x Reduction’ in Costs for Its Cultured Fat

Dutch cultured protein company Mosa Meat said over the weekend it has reduced the cost of its fat media by 66 times thanks to the work of a group the company refers to as its Fat Team. Without listing actual price numbers, Mosa Meat said its fat medium now costs 1.52 percent of what it did less than two years ago, in September of 2019.

In the cultivated meat-making process, the nutrient-rich growth medium fed to cells triggers those cells to grow into muscle, fat, and tissue, all of which are put together to create a final end product. A company might grow fat cells for use in its own meat analogues, or it could sell the fat as an ingredient to other businesses. Fat is also a crucial component in achieving a “meatier” taste, texture, and mouthfeel when it comes to cultured protein.  

Mosa Meat, of course, is well known as the company that created the world’s first cultivated hamburger back in 2013 — for a cool $325,000. A huge part of this cost was (and still is for many) the growth medium, which at the time was made using fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is as expensive as it is controversial. As the Good Food Institute puts it, “The use of animal-derived components in cultivated meat production has prohibitive economic, food safety, and ethical constraints.”

In July of last year, Mosa Meat said it had achieved a more than 80x cost reduction for its growth media, a milestone largely driven by the company’s ability to develop FBS-free media. The company now uses an “animal component free” media that is part of the reason the Fat Team was able to announce its own cost reductions recently.

“We’ve definitely checked yet another box on our journey towards a product that meets the expectations of critical meat lovers,” company cofounder Peter Verstrate said in this weekend’s announcement. 

Mosa Meat’s announcement comes not long after MeaTech 3D, an Israeli company, said it would produce cultivated fat at a new pilot production facility. Additionally, last month Mission Barns raised $24 million to build up a production facility in San Francisco for its cultivated fat business. Meanwhile, multiple companies, from Avant Meats to Future Meat, have announced price slashes in production costs over the last several months.

Lowering costs, whether of fat, medium, or other components, will help the entire cultured meat industry get products closer to price parity with their traditional counterparts. Price parity is only of many other milestones that have to be achieved in order to make cultivated meat a commercial reality. However, it is seen by many as an extremely crucial step in the process. 

Mosa Meat doesn’t yet have a timeframe for when it might have burgers in front of customers, or how much they’ll cost once that happens. At last check, the company was working with European regulators to get approval for its products. 

May 17, 2021

Full English: Ivy Farm Aims to Launch Cell-Based Sausages by 2023

Add Ivy Farm Technologies to the growing number of startups around the world creating cell-based meat. Ivy Farm announced itself at the end of last week, saying it plans to produce cultured sausages for markets and restaurants by 2023.

U.K.-based Ivy Farm Technologies is a spin-off from Oxford University, where co-founders Dr. Russ Tucker and Professor Cathy Ye met at the school’s Department of Engineering Science. Oxford provided the source of Ivy Farm’s key technology as well as seed funding through the University Challenge Seed Fund.

Like most cell-based meat companies, Ivy Farm uses a small number of cells taken from an animal and places those cells in a bioreactor, where they are grown and multiplied into meat. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, Ivy Farm says its technology is a “game changer” because of “a unique ‘scaffold’ system where the cells grow.” UPDATE: In an email Ivy Farm said that it’s approach to scaffolding involves creating a special surface that allows for the “continuous harvest” of cells (there’s no need to stop the system), at a lower cost vs. other technologies. Oxford owns the technology and has licensed it out to Ivy Farm.

The company wasn’t more specific about its scaffold technology (we reached out to them for more informationSee Update above), but focusing on different scaffolding techniques certainly isn’t unique for an alternative protein startup. Matrix Meats, Ecovative, and NovaMeat all tout different solutions to scaffolding alternative meats.

Ivy Farm’s goal of selling its cultured meat in stores and restaurants by 2023 is certainly ambitious seeing as the only country to approve the sale of cultured meat so far has been Singapore. Additionally, Ivy Farm is only now kicking off its fundraising, with the goal of raising raising £16m (~$22.5M USD) to create an R&D facility. That’s a lot to accomplish in less than two years.

Ivy Farm isn’t the only cell-based meat startup in the U.K. to get funding this year, or the only startup to be spun out of a university there. CellulaREvolution, which raised £1 million (~$1.37M USD at the time) in February, was borne out of research done at Newcastle University. CellulaREvolution has developed a synthetic peptide coating and smaller footprint bioreactor.

We are all for more startups developing cell-based meat, especially ones with big ambitious goals. Ivy Farms is certainly ambitious, now we’ll have to see if its technology can match its claims.

May 13, 2021

A Mid-Year Assessment for Alternative Protein

More companies, more investments, and many more scientific breakthroughs. Those are just a few predictions for the future of alternative protein the Good Food Institute (GFI) sets out in its latest State of Industry reports. Three different papers — one each on plant-based protein, fermentation, and cultivated protein — go in-depth into the trends that drove alternative protein in 2020 and what we can expect for the rest of 2021.

As we’ve written before, investment in alternative protein topped $3.1 billion in 2020, which is more than three times the amount raised by the sector in 2019. Driving those investments are, says GFI, numerous developments across the commercial landscape, investments, scientific and technological developments, and regulatory and government activity.

The State of Industry reports cover the obvious developments, such as the world’s first sale of cultivated meat and plant-based meat’s $7 billion in retail sales. But more interesting now is what we can expect in the future — that is, for the remainder of 2021 and on into the next few years. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of those developments:

Expect lots more pilot production environments for cultivated meat. Reaching pilot scale could be seen as the step that bridges a company’s proof-of-concept phase with its commercial phase. GFI notes that at this stage, companies would be producing “hundreds or thousands” of metric tons of cultured meat. (Millions would be required for a company to scale to an industrial level.) Reaching pilot scale would mean being able to supply “a limited number of high-end restaurants in the coming one to three years.” (Read more on why restaurants are critical to cultivated meat’s growth.)

As GFI points out, multiple companies are now transitioning into this pilot-scale phase, including BlueNalu, MosaMeat, and SuperMeat. The latter even turned its pilot production site (pictured above) into a restaurant where consumers can taste the company’s cultured chicken in exchange for leaving detailed feedback. Elsewhere, Aleph Farms and MeaTech 3D plan to have facilities running by 2022 and Avant Meats recently announced a pilot production facility for Singapore. UPSIDE Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, has also just broken ground on a facility.

Cellular agriculture will become its own field of study. One PhD candidate at Tufts University noted that we can expect cell ag to get its own degree program at universities, and have a “separate and distinct curriculum.”

Fermentation production will increase. “If we believe in the projection of 25%-30% CAGR, then for fermentation to even maintain its share of the market, there is a need for a 10x+ increase in capacity by 2030,” Jim Laird of 3F Bio states in GFI’s fermentation report. Of course, needing to increase and actually doing it are two different things, but one of the advantages of fermentation is that it is already seen as a ost-competitive, scalable, and validated process. Many, including the GFI, have begun calling it the “third pillar of alt protein.”

Meanwhile, a number of companies, including Solar Biotech, MycoTechnology, and Nature’s Fynd are developing technologies and processes that will make fermentation even more cost-effective, which could in turn increase companies’ ability to produce.

Fermentation could “revolutionize” the entire alt-protein landscape. It has the potential to influence other areas of alternative protein. As GFI’s report notes, “Fermentation can enable a new generation of proteins, fats, and other functional ingredients that combine with plant-based and cultivated components to create biomimicking whole-cut meats, egg replacements, animal-free dairy proteins, seafood products, and more.” 

Along those lines, the next few years could see hybrid blends of meat, where fermentation-derived protein could also include plant and animal cell components. Fermentation is also already part of a number of other “alt” products besides meat, including cheese and bee honey.

More restaurants will go plant-based. We’ve been mulling the future of the plant-based restaurant for a while. Now that the world is beginning to come out of its various stages of lockdown and people are returning to dining rooms, there’s an enormous opportunity for plant-based foods to take center stage at restaurants. More restaurants will move to full plant-based menus, such as those seen from Canada-based Copper Branch and, most recently, Eleven Madison Park in NYC.

Plant-based chicken will be a big part of this shift. Right now there’s a distinct lack of choices, both in restaurants and grocery stores, when it comes to poultry. Expect this to change rapidly, starting with restaurants. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is also important to keep in mind the many challenges the alt-protein sector still has to face, from improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat to bringing down the cost of cell-culture media. There are also heaps of regulatory approvals to be obtained before many of these companies and solutions can actually reach consumers.

Some of these challenges will be solved in 2021; others are years away from solutions. But if there’s one overarching takeaway we can glean from GFI’s report trio, it’s that everything — from number of companies to production levels to investment dollars — is going to increase astronomically this year for alternative protein.

More Headlines

MeaTech 3D Will Produce Cultivated Fat, Whole Steaks at Its Forthcoming Pilot Facility – The Israeli bioprinting startup this week announced a pilot production facility where the company will scale up production of its cultivated fat and continue work on whole cuts of cultivated steak.

Memphis Meats Rebrands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken Product – The company rebranded and also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year, pending regulatory approval.

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech – The Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup will use the $2 million in a debt-financing round to scale up its renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.

May 12, 2021

Memphis Meats Re-Brands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken as its First Product

Memphis Meats, one of the older cell-based protein startups, announced today that it has rebranded and is now UPSIDE Foods. Perhaps more important, the company also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year… pending regulatory approval.

Founded in 2015, UPSIDE Foods cultivates animal protein without the need to raise animals. The company is working on cell-based versions of different kinds of meat, but said in today’s press announcement that it chose chicken as its first product because of its versatility in recipes and culinary applications, as well as its appeal across geographic regions.

To make its cell-basd meat at scale, UPSIDE has broken ground on a production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. The full-stack facility will produce, package and ship cultured meat at what the company says is a larger capacity than any other cell-based meat company.

Back in 2019, UPSIDE told The Spoon that the company was holding off on establishing a concrete launch date for their cultivated meat until they could guarantee their product was tasty and scalable, and until regulatory frameworks were established. This last bit was echoed in today’s press release with the “pending regulatory approval” caveat. So far, Singapore is the only country that has approved the sale of cultured meat. There hasn’t been as much clarity here in the U.S., though execs at cultured meat startups are hopeful approvals will be granted in the next two years.

We are definitely entering into a new phase in the evolution of cultured meat. A number of cell-based startups around the world have received funding this year, including CellulaRevolution, CellMeat, Mirai Foods and New Age Meats. In addition to more funding, UPSIDE and other established cultured protein startups like BlueNalu and Avant Meats are opening up their own production facilities to scale up the manufacturing of their meat.

It’s also worth noting that UPSIDE’s chicken announcement comes during the same week that Future Meat said it has dropped the production price of its cell-based chicken by 50 percent. In an interview with Plant Based News, Future Meat CEO, Rom Kshuk said it now costs $4 to produce 110 grams of its chicken, and that price should drop to $2 over the next year and a half. Reaching price parity with conventional animal meat will be a key factor in the success of cultured meat.

Along with a new identity, UPSIDE also announced a new investor today. Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, has invested an undisclosed sum in UPSIDE.

UPSIDE’s new name and look also reflects the company moving into its own next phase as it advances beyond research and into commercial production. If you’re interested in seeing how it all began with the company, I recommend watching the documentary Meat the Future, which chronicles the rise of Memphis Meats from its very early days through much of its growth.

Meat The Future (2020) I Official Trailer I MetFilm Sales

May 11, 2021

Future Meat Once Again Slashes Production Price of Cultured Chicken

This week, Future Meat Technologies announced that it was able to reduce the production price of 110 grams of its cultured chicken breast to $4 (h/t Plant Based News). This is the second time this year that Future Meat technologies has the lowered the production price of its cultivated protein, after having reduced the price of a quarter-pound of cultured chicken breast to $7.50 in February.

This significant price drop will help bring Future Meat closer to price parity with conventional chicken and bring its first product to market. The company’s CEO, Rom Kshuk, said that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12-18, and within that same timeframe, the company hopes to launch its product in the U.S. market.

Like other cultured meat companies, Future Meat extracts animal cells and replicates them in large bioreactors. However, the company is different from others because it uses a blend of both plant-based and animal-based ingredients for its cultured meat product.

Cultured meat is expensive to make, so many companies are racing to reach price parity with traditional meat. A consumer may choose to buy alternative meat products for ethical, environmental, and health reasons, but often, the cost of food is the driving factor in our purchasing decisions. According to The Spoon’s publisher, Michael Wolf, several things need to happen to reduce the production cost of cultured meat, including the optimization of the commercial process, bigger and better bioreactors, and a reduction in the price of growth mediums. Once companies like Future Meat reach price parity, this will allow cultured meat to become commercially viable.

Though where cultured meat could become commercially viable is another matter altogether, as Singapore remains the only country that has allowed the sale of cultivated meat. In December, Eat Just was the first company in the world to sell cultured meat at a restaurant in Singapore, and recently entered into a partnership with meal delivery service foodpanda to offer home delivery of cultured meat. Aleph Farms has plans to bring cultured meat to both Brazil and Japan. SuperMeat currently has a restaurant/tasting facility where customers cannot pay but can try cultured meat in exchange for feedback.

Future Meat has been looking for regulatory approval in multiple countries, but it has yet to announce any approvals.

May 6, 2021

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

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Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

May 6, 2021

Red to Green Ep 3: Breaking Through Resistance to Cultured Meat

We humans are resistant to unfamiliar things.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t change, and one of the ways in which consumers will change their mind is consistent and repeated exposure to a new idea or concept. The more a consumer hears an idea, the newness and unfamiliarity wears off and it becomes normalized.

It happens all the time in technology. Fifteen years ago, most of us would have been uncomfortable jumping in a complete stranger’s car to catch a ride somewhere. Nowadays – pandemic concerns aside – most everyone would not think it’s weird to hail a stranger’s car using a ride sharing service like Uber or Lyft.

Chris Bryant, an independent food system researcher who also acts as the Director of Social Science for the Cellular Agriculture Society, says that this comfort through familiarity will also work with cultured meat.

“We see this kind of familiarity effect going on, both in quantitative and qualitative research,” said Bryant in the latest episode of the Red to Green podcast series focused on alt protein and consumer acceptance. “So on the quantitative front, as I mentioned, we can see just quite a strong correlation between familiarity and acceptance.  People who have a more familiarity or more likely to say that they’d eat it.”

Those that adopt something early often have a strong personal reason or belief that drives behavior change. With cultivated meat, that reason is likely a concern for animal welfare.

“In terms of their impact on people’s purchase intentions and actual food, decision-making,” said Bryant “it seems like there are other benefits which could be more important to highlight. Say for example it seems like those earliest adopters are most enthusiastic about the kind of ethical benefits animals and the environment.”

But for many, they aren’t motivated enough by animal welfare to change behavior, especially when it comes to something as new and different from cellular agriculture. For these more resistant types, Bryant believes cultivated meat companies need to sell them on how this new type of meat will benefit them.

“For the more skeptical consumers, they need to see that there’s actually a benefit to themselves. So what can cultured meat offer them that meat from animals can’t?”

Bryant thinks there are a couple benefits companies can focus on to convert those looking for personal benefits from cultured meat. First, they should emphasize how much cleaner meat is from cellular agriculture is compared to traditional animal agriculture products.

“That serves to highlight that meat produced in this way, unlike meat from animals, doesn’t have these pathogens in there, doesn’t have traces of antibiotics and other nasty stuff that you get when you chop up an animal,” said Bryant.

They could also focus on a better nutritional profile.

“This is something that a lot of cultured meat producers are considering,” said Bryant. “Can we produce cultured meat that doesn’t have saturated fat? Unlike meat from animals. Can we improve it by offering other micronutrients and vitamins in a way that we can add things to cultured meat in a way that we can’t add things to meat from animals?”

You can listen to the full conversation with Chris Bryant in Marina Schmidt’s Red to Green podcast by clicking play below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe!

You can also read the transcript below.

Marina Schmidt

Chris, you’re also working with companies. How are you working with them? What are you doing? With whom are you working?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, that’s right. So I just recently finished my PhD at the University of Bath and I’m now consulting through my company, Bryant Research Ltd, with a number of nonprofits and also alternative protein companies in  the animal food replacement space. I’ve done work with the charity Viva!, uh, The Good Food Institute and also Faunalytics.

And I’ve been working with companies as well. I’ve worked with The Better Meat co, also Aleph Farms, the cultured meat company in Israel and the cultured dairy company Formo. Previously known as Legendairy, a cultured dairy company in Germany.

So my work with these nonprofits and companies is generally to do with identifying the best kind of markets and messaging for the strategies for speeding up dietary change for alternative protein companies. It’s who’s going to be buying their products and cutting down on meat. And for charities that can be, you know, who to reach out to with advocacy and what kind of messages to put in front of people that they will  wake up and change their behaviors.

Marina Schmidt

So Chris, give us a little overview of how the current state of consumer acceptance is. What is the research saying? How many people are actually up to eating cultured meat?

Chris Bryant

Yeah. So, the research is showing that in most markets we have about one in five people very enthusiastic about cultured meat that they would buy it with you know, few conditions and little other information. Whereas others can be quite skeptical. They might be later adopters.

They’re also known as laggards. And importantly, currently most people actually don’t know about cultured meat. So most people aren’t aware that this is something that exists. We also see that increased awareness is something that’s related to increased acceptance. So for people who are more familiar with cultured meats, they’re more likely to say that they would eat it.

That’s something encouraging in terms of the rate of acceptance kind of changing over time as people got more familiar with the product

Marina Schmidt

Hmm. I’ve been talking with, all of my friends about cultivated meat, obviously, and they’ve been hearing enough of it. And one of my good friends, I would call him very open-minded, but he was actually against it, the first time that he heard of it. And he said, after hearing about it, the second, third, fourth, or fifth time, he warmed up to the idea.

He wouldn’t have been fond of it at first, but it was important for him to be repeatedly exposed to the messaging and the benefits of it to then actually become familiar with it and loosen up this, this skepticism around it, is that also reflected in your research?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, absolutely. We see this kind of familiarity effect going on, both in quantitative and qualitative research. So on the quantitative front, as I mentioned, we can see just quite a strong correlation between familiarity and acceptance.  People who have a more familiarity or more likely to say that they’d eat it.

And then also in focus groups, many times focus groups observe exactly what you’re describing. You know, it’s very similar to what we see in other areas as well. There are parts of psychology demonstrating this kind of mere exposure effect, right.

Where you will develop a more positive attitude to something just merely by encountering it more frequently.  I think another important part of that picture, as well is the social transmission or the social construction we could say, of what is edible and also what is ethical.

So these are socially constructed ideas. There are things which humans could eat, but which we don’t consider edible. In terms of just being normal to eat, right? And so one thing that that’s something that’s going to change. And then the other part is the ethical part, where, as I mentioned, many people are kind of, post-hoc justifying the killing of animals for meat because they want the meat.

But once you have a system where you can have the meat and you don’t have to kill the animals, that motivation behind the motivated reasoning kind of melts away. And so this could, I think, pave the way for people to have a more honest, ethical conversation about killing animals for food. If we can say, if we don’t, you know, if the conversation is not to say killing animals for food, getting animals for meat is bad, and therefore you’ve got to stop eating meat. But rather to say killing animals, meat is bad and therefore we need to move towards producing meat in a different way. I think that’s much more acceptable to a lot of people.

Marina Schmidt

So the mere exposure effect seems to allude to the importance of companies communicating about it early and a lot. But the question is, well, how do they communicate about it? As you just said, we can go the route of talking about the ethics. We can talk about the sustainability aspects, probably various other routes.

And in the end, most food is talked about actually in terms of texture and features, benefits directly experienced by the consumer when they eat it. So based on the research that you’ve also reviewed, what is the best route to take, to communicate the benefits of cultivated meat?

Chris Bryant

So there were some conditions, as you mentioned, which will be just necessary preconditions for people wanting to eat cultured meat. They’ll need to find it to be a good taste, acceptable in terms of price, and also be confident that it’s safe by regulations or, or whatever else. In terms of communicating about the benefits there, yeah, there’s an interesting thing going on here where most people find benefits to animals and to a slightly lesser extent to the environment, to be the most obvious benefits of cultured meat, right? These are the things that everyone kind of gets it. We’re making meat without animals and therefore that’s good for the animals.

In terms of their impact on people’s purchase intentions and actual food, decision-making, it seems like there are other benefits which could be more important to highlight. Say for example it seems like those earliest adopters are most enthusiastic about the kind of ethical benefits animals and the environment, as I mentioned.

But for the more skeptical consumers, they need to see that there’s actually a benefit to themselves. So what can cultured meat offer them that meat from animals can’t? And there are a couple of ways that companies can go with that. The first, as I mentioned is to talk about the purity and cleanliness of cultured meat.

This was part of the thinking behind the term clean meat which has kind of come and gone in the industry. But that serves to highlight that meat produced in this way, unlike meat from animals, doesn’t have these pathogens in there, doesn’t have traces of antibiotics and other nasty stuff that you get when you chop up an animal.

Another thing that’s discussed in terms of offering consumers like personal, tangible benefits is nutritional enhancements. And this is something that a lot of cultured meat producers are considering. Can we produce cultured meat that doesn’t have saturated fat? Unlike meat from animals. Can we improve it by offering other micronutrients and vitamins in a way that we can add things to cultured meat in a way that we can’t add things to meat from animals?

So providing these kind of tangible personal benefits, I think is going to be important in communicating about cultured meats. 

Marina Schmidt

 Hmm. You know, I always find it quite interesting to take examples from related fields. And I have a background in technology history. I found that, regarding bicycles, for example, most people think that this is just something that was invented. And then people just said, oh, amazing, a bicycle, and started using bicycles, but the invention of a bicycle was actually a 19 year long tedious process in which the branding and the reaction of consumers had just as much of an influence on how it developed as the technical part of it.

So there was one interesting development during this 19 year long process where the bicycle industry with tires wanted to promote these bicycles to women specifically. Because they were saying, well, it’s more safe and therefore you should be using that. they wanted to get this market, but what ended up happening is that back in the day,  men were saying, I don’t want a bicycle that is for a woman. I want an adventurous bicycle. And what was supposed to increase the market share was actually decreasing the market share of the safer bicycle with tires.

And I find it interesting to see these backlash effects, well intended. Do you see that something like this could happen by over focusing on selling to vegans in that way or selling to people based on morals?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, excellent, excellent question. I think there has been a kind of strange obsession with the reaction of vegetarians and vegans to cultured meat. I think a part of that is  just that people like to cross-examine a vegetarian, right, see if they’re going to be  consistent with the given reasons. You know, now we can have meat, but it didn’t come from an animal, and what do you think of that? And it’s quite intuitive, I think for reporters to think, this is an issue which presumably vegetarians care about. But actually the consumer data tends to tell a bit of a different story.

Vegetarians and vegans often understand the benefits of cultured meat and might even be excited about them, but actually most meat avoiders are not really interested in eating cultured meat. For most people who have given up meat already, they’re not seeing cultured meat necessarily as a way to start eating meat again. But rather we see that the most enthusiastic cultured meat future consumers are the heavy meat-eaters of today. So unlike other animal product replacements for example, plant-based meats, we tend to see that plant based products, they can be more appealing to females, and also are more appealing to vegetarians, vegans people who are at least flexitarian you know, meat, reducing. Whereas cultured meat on the other hand seems to be most appealing to males and also to heaviest meat eaters.

And I think that that is a good thing, firstly, because we don’t really have anything to gain by selling cultured meat to vegetarians. What we really are interested in doing is displacing demand for meat from animals, right? And so going after meat eaters is what you want to be doing. But more importantly than that, perhaps as you mentioned, we don’t want cultured meat to come to be seen as a product for vegetarians in a way that some of these plant-based products in the past may have suffered, the vegetarian option. Well, if I’m a meat eater, that’s just not for me. And so I think that cultured meat being meat and being marketed as such and in that way is going to be the best in terms of appealing to those heavy meat-eating consumers.

Marina Schmidt

I’m gonna say something that’s actually gonna be published later during the podcast So in a future episode, Jack Bobo will talk about it’s not just a topic of influencing consumer acceptance, but also influencing the whole mood, the whole environment in the industry.

So specifically how corporates perceive it and how willing corporates are to adopt the technology. And my personal opinion is that from innovation history and technology history, we can learn that big corporations and established players have an incredible power to stall innovation. And so it’s super important to go for collaboration and Jacob Bobo is arguing against clean meat and against talking about any benefits against conventional meat. So it’s cleaner because conventional meat is dirty because it creates an atmosphere of friction and it reduces the potential of collaboration.

What would you respond to that?

Chris Bryant

I think that there definitely is something to be said for that there’s a lot of cultured meat companies who have investments from, or kind of partnerships with conventional meat producers. And of course those companies are incredibly important in terms of accessing the meat markets. It’s definitely better to have those companies kind of with you rather than against you.

But at the same time, I think that whether there are benefits to a cultured meat over conventional meat we need to be strident in highlighting them and showing that there are reasons to want to move away from conventional meat production.

It might not be a particularly strategic thing for a company trying to make partnerships but I think that it is for us to be vocal in our criticisms of the animal production methods today.

Marina Schmidt

Are there differences in the populations that are interested in cultivated meat? So you were alluding to men. Did you see other cultural differences that influence it?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, there were a few sort of demographic factors which predict higher acceptance of cultured meat. As you mentioned, we tend to see slightly higher acceptance amongst men compared to women. And we tend to see higher acceptance amongst heavier meat eaters, compared to vegetarians and vegans. And there’s a few other things that we can see as well.

Generally, younger consumers are more open to eating cultivated meat compared to consumers who are, perhaps, a bit more set in their ways with respect to meat consumption in older groups. We can also see that people living in cities and people who have higher levels of education, people who tend to be left leaning politically, these are all groups which tend to be more open to eating cultured meat.

So that was kind of painting a picture of the kinds of early, early adopters of this technology, which we might expect to see.

Marina Schmidt

What are the most common concerns and criticisms or barriers to acceptance?

Chris Bryant

As you mentioned, many people have concerns about naturalness and kind of safety  of cultured meat.  Many people have this suspicion really, of science being involved in their food. This is something that we’ve seen with respect to other food technologies as well.

I think that regulators definitely need to have robust processes in place in order to give consumers the confidence that cultured meat they can buy is going to be safe and nutritious for them. And companies need to be transparent in their communications and also clear and highlighting the benefits of cultured meat over conventional meat.

I think that it’s likely that the kind of level of concern on these topics will wane over time. Of course this is going to be something where the concern is strongest, where the familiarity is lowest. And then once people have the opportunity to try cultured meat for themselves, or perhaps they know people who have tried it, it’s been on the market for a few years. It’s going to simply seem a bit less strange, which I think is at the core of a lot of those kinds of intuitive concerns.

Marina Schmidt

So I think one thing that we need to address is that  consumer attitudes are not linear, so they can also turn around and change. Just as we see with, for example, vaccines becoming a more polarized issue and people previously not having strong opinions, actually we’re having positive opinions, maybe changing their mind about them.

How much do you see the topic of potential fake news, of conspiracy theories, of scandals being an issue for the industry? How much do you think is crisis communication something that cultured meat companies should invest in early?

Chris Bryant

So there’s there’s a few studies which have looked at kind of technology adoption of similar technologies or technologies which seem to have a lot of promise for mankind, but have had some problems with our adoption. The Sentience Institute has done a wonderful series of case studies looking at GM foods, biofuels and also nuclear power. So, these are three examples  of things where there’s really a lot of potential for good to be done on some of the major issues that we’re facing today. And yet they have kind of had problems with respect to adoption and public perception and so on.

One of the lessons from those studies is that if there are safety issues, they’re perceived as much worse if they relate to things that people already had safety concerns about. I do think that it’s worth companies investing in having solid plans for communicating about cultured meat technology. And in particular we do need to be aware that some consumers will be pushing back against… well, first of all, we won’t be able to sell to everybody straight away. There will be some people who need to take time to come around to the idea. And also we can see that initially the quantity is going to be lower and the price is going to be higher than for conventional meats. And so we kind of have the space to focus the sales, just on those people who are enthusiastic about buying it.

And hoping that we don’t have, kind of major pushback from consumers who are not so enthusiastic about the technology. You mentioned vaccines and people sort of becoming skeptical about vaccines in particular through conspiracy theories and so on. Interestingly there is actually some research that shows rejection of cultured meat is associated with conspiratorial thinking.

So it does seem that the kind of person who might be an anti-vaxxer might also find themselves being an anti-cultured-meater. But yeah, I suppose we shall see.

Marina Schmidt

We even have the word for it now. An “anti-cultured-meater.”

Chris Bryant

Yeah. If, if I just coined the phrase, I feel I could have done better.

Marina Schmidt

So how does the consumer acceptance vary in different countries and how’s it influenced by religion?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, really interesting, really interesting question about religion.  First of all, I’d say that we do see pretty solid markets for cultured meat products in many countries around the world. We’ve done studies in European countries, in America and in Asian countries as well. And we see that in all of those countries, there’s a decent number of people who already say that they’d be willing to eat cultured meat.

There are a few religions around the world that have, kind of, specific prescriptions about their adherence, meat consumption; Buddhism and Hinduism. Often people who follow these religions actually don’t eat meat. And  for these people, these could be some of the vegetarians who we discussed before, who may now have a source of ethically produced meat, but it didn’t require an animal to die. So in those religions, as I understand it, there actually aren’t explicit rules about meat consumption, but many of the adherence interpreted it as requiring vegetarianism. And so they, they do that. Presumably for those people, there’s some room for maneuver if they wanted to change their diet.

And more specifically than that, and more kind of in the weeds of the religious texts, I suppose, are Islam and Judaism. So these are two other religions with specific rules about meat consumption and explicitly in this case, we have upwards of a billion Muslims around the world who are required to eat Halal meat only, which has been slaughtered in  a ritual slaughter by having a throat slit. And it’s something like a similar process of ritual slaughter for producing kosher meat in the Jewish faith. And in both of these cases, it’s kind of interesting because the religious rules around slaughtering animals for meat appear to have come from a concern for animal welfare, right? At the time when these rules were developed, if you want to kill an animal, slitting its throat was probably the quickest way, and least suffering way of doing that.

And of course at the times when these rules were developed those who developed them didn’t necessarily anticipate the creation of meat which could be separated entirely from animals. So you kind of come to an interesting impasse where cultured meat has not come from a slaughtered animal.

And yet it may now not be compliant with some aspects of those religious requirements, which were kind of to do with animal welfare in the first place. So it is likely the cultured meat will be acceptable in a Halal and Kosher forms. It is feasible to make cultured meat, which kind of ticks those boxes. According to religious scholars in the area, we will be able  to have Kosher cultured meat and Halal cultured meats. Although the other question which comes up with respect to those two dietary requirements is about pork. Pork is, not allowed in Judaism and Islam. And the question becomes, could it be, could you have kind of kosher bacon if it was made by a cultured meat as opposed to taken from a pig? I think that the jury is still out on that one.

Marina Schmidt

So in your research, you are also mentioning reasons why people don’t care about reducing their meat consumption. Could you give a brief overview of the reasons why?

Chris Bryant

As I experienced the problem, myself, meat is just quite nice to eat, right? And so the idea of giving up meat, in many people, produces an automatic kickback reaction. The ones who reflectively give reasons justifying eating meats, they don’t want to come to the conclusion that they’ll stop eating meat. And so all of their reasoning and thinking about the issue kind of works backwards from there. So this is called in psychology, motivated reasoning, and yeah, it’s a very well demonstrated phenomenon. And in particular, with respect to meat consumption it has been shown in a couple of experiments.

One really neat experiment,  which demonstrates this well, is this set up where they ask people about the moral value of cows; whether they think that cows deserve moral consideration. And there are two conditions in the experiment. In the first condition, people are given some nuts to snack on before they answer the question. And in the other condition, people are given beef jerky. And perhaps you can guess the punchline here. The people who were given beef jerky were less likely to say that cows deserved moral consideration and can feel pain and so on. So actually the food that they had been randomly assigned to eat changed their beliefs about cows.

So it’s this quite remarkable process and we can see similar things as well. People are more likely to order a vegetarian option if menus say cow or pig instead of beef or pork. Right?  The idea that this is actually coming from a dead animal, it’s kind of gross to most people. And you know, we have a phrase in English that nobody likes to see how the sausage is made.

Definitely the case with respect to actual sausages.

Marina Schmidt

Totally. And I think you also mentioned  the scale in sensitivity.

Chris Bryant

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the idea that basically humans are not very good at processing very large numbers of things.

We kind of become insensitive to changes in scale beyond a certain quite low point. And actually it can end up kind of working against us. So there’s an experiment which demonstrates this phenomenon where people are asked how much money they would be willing to donate to save some birds from an oil spill.

And there were a few different conditions where people are asked how much they’d be willing to donate to save. In one condition, 200 birds in one condition, 2000, and in one condition, 20,000. Right? So each condition it’s like an order of magnitude more birds that you could save. And what they found is that people didn’t differ between those conditions in terms of how much they were willing to donate.

So the 20,000 birds was no more compelling than the 200 birds in terms of how much people were willing to give to alleviate the suffering. Right?  If we’re being rational about it, it ought to be a hundred times more compelling, but it wasn’t. And we can see this as well in some kind of charity appeals where charities you know, are aware of this effect, and will often use marketing materials and so on which refer to a single identifiable victim.

It’s much more effective to talk about one young girl whose life has been affected by malaria say than it is to talk about however many millions of people die of malaria each year. It becomes a statistic rather than something people can relate to. 

And as a result of that, we can’t really grasp the scale of what goes on in animal agriculture. And so as a result of that, we can’t really connect with the appropriate level of urgency, just isn’t available to us emotionally.

Marina Schmidt

So when we look at consumer attitudes could you, before we get into the details and the results give an overview of the scientific field, how far are we in researching consumer attitudes on cultivated meat?

Chris Bryant

Yeah, well, this is actually an area that’s come a long way in the past few years. I started my PhD on this topic in 2016 and just finished last year in 2020. And in that time there’s been dozens of studies on this topic in different countries and different experiments about naming and explanations and so on.

So the fields come quite a long way in the past five years or so. And actually we’re starting to understand quite well the kinds of markets that are out there and the kinds of messages that we ought to be using to get consumers excited about cultured meat.

Marina Schmidt

So we were talking about other related fields where technologies have been vilified by the public and where the negative aspects tend to be very prevalent versus the positive possibilities possibly downplayed in the media. And maybe you can share some of the insights from related fields like GMOs or biofuels or nuclear energy.

Chris Bryant

So yes, The Sentience Institute has a great series of case studies where they look at GMO’s biofuels and nuclear power which are all technologies which could have huge benefits, but they have faced significant problems with their adoption. And so we can really learn some lessons from those kinds of industries.

And some of the biggest from this work for the alternative protein space were  to be transparent in the developments and the communications, not to develop the perception that they’re being secretive or hiding things from the public. To aim, to be somewhat flexible in their technological approach.

And in particular, you know, we see now many cultured meat companies, which are focusing on a specific part of the process. Some companies are specializing in producing cultured fats, for example, only. Others are leaning into developing the bioreactors. And it’s suggested that this kind of ecosystem, where there are different companies providing kind of different components of products and networks, provides a more robust ecosystem overall; compared to just a series of vertically integrated companies that are all trying to do everything in house.

Obviously then that gives you a kind of situation where if one of those companies fails, they are only one part of the network and there may be others which can provide the same inputs. Also, I think that a big thing is to focus on communicating the benefits and not to spend lots of time on very technical refutations of perceived issues and drawbacks. They found that with respect to the GM foods, when companies were putting out these very detailed, scientific explanations of why the technology was safe that was not able to be understood by most people and primarily just really drew attention to the safety issue, right? So it’s kind of thought that in terms of communications, it’s better to spend more time communicating the potential benefits than giving very detailed refutations to, and, lots of air time to perceived issues.

Marina Schmidt

Yes, we have this very thin line that we need to walk between not being secretive and not oversharing and giving TMI (too much information) on the wrong point. You know, there is a  belief in the industry that if you just give people all the information and you are completely transparent, that people will be like “Oh, well, it’s, good, ot’s safe”. But at the same time in your research it was shown that the focus on high tech or a technology focused way of communicating, it’s actually turning people off.

And as far as I remember, it’s actually one of the worst ways to communicate about cultured meat. So how do we strike the line between, we should be transparent about the technology, but talking about technology is the most unsexy thing to do.

Chris Bryant

Right… Yeah. I think that has to do with the extent to which people feel like they understand the technology. And if it’s kind of explained in terms that are not understandable then that contributes to this sense of like, this is something that I don’t properly understand or can’t like assess whether I should be eating it.

And people are gonna feel that way. If it’s communicated in a way that they can understand there’s actually a great example of how this can happen in I guess science communication in general. Have you heard  the thing about dihydrogen monoxide? It is a bit of a meme on the internet of like, this is a substance, which is found in all cancers and like an abundance of this will cause you to die. And of course it’s water, right? Dihydrogen monoxide is, is H2O water. And the idea of course, is that if you explain anything in these kinds of technical terms, you can make it seem scarier than it really is. 

So, yeah, I think that’s definitely something to bear in mind when talking about food technology in general. I think that we need to communicate it in a way that people feel they can understand the basic idea and understand enough to know what they’re eating, but obviously we don’t expect most people to understand how to make cultured meat.

Right?

Marina Schmidt

So to come to the ending questions if you would have $50 million, in what businesses would you invest it in?

Chris Bryant

You mean another $50 million? I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Marina Schmidt

A third $50 million. Can you, can you give me one of them?

Chris Bryant

I think that food technology is a very exciting area right now. I think that we’re kind of coming up on a number of tipping points with respect to food production because this is something which is very social. I think that there is a point when enough people get on board, everyone will get on board and it will kind of go in this S shape where we suddenly see very fast adoption.

And there will be some people at the end of the laggards who need substantial kind of social pressure to, to change their habits. But I do think that there’s going to be that kind of social tipping point and coupled with really, actually, more serious attention being given to the environmental harms from animal agriculture.

I think it’s only a matter of time before governments have to start doing something about this. And those two factors combined, I think, make alternative proteins,  cultured meat and also plant-based meats and fermentation based and all of the other technologies which are looking to replace animal products. I think that they are looking like a pretty good investment now.

Marina Schmidt

Regarding food, sustainability or agriculture, what is an unusual opinion that you hold that many people would disagree with?

Chris Bryant

A really interesting thing in alternative proteins is insects. This is something that’s kind of spoken about sometimes alongside cultured meat and plant-based meat as like, you know, another thing that we could eat instead of environmentally damaging meat is insects. 

Now there is some evidence to suggest that it is less intensive in terms of environmental outcomes to produce insects compared to other animals. Although there’s also some evidence to suggest that  for the most part, Western consumers don’t really want to eat just like whole unprocessed insects, like it might be common in parts of Asia, for example. But some more kind of feasible products seem to be things like cricket flour, like these processed kind of products.

The issue is that the processing involved can be very energy intensive. To the point where be the case that insects producers end up wiping out the efficiency gains in terms of the extra processing that they need to do to make it acceptable for consumers. So that’s definitely something to bear in mind and I think be skeptical about insects.

The other part of that is an interesting ethical part. Basically killing animals for food, you can get about 200 meals from one cow. Whereas one chicken will give you just two meals, right? So in order to get the same amount of meat, you need to kill a hundred times as many chickens.

Because chickens are smaller and less similar to humans, I guess, and so harder to empathize with, they tend to be treated much worse in agriculture. And in much higher numbers. So, it’s actually quite a bit more ethical to eat beef than it is to eat chicken as a result of that. In terms of the amount of suffering associated with each.

Now my view is that it’s likely that insects are going to be to chickens as chickens are to cows in this kind of equation. And that by moving to eating even smaller animals, we’re going to multiply that kind of ethical problem again. And if we move towards farming and eating insects that could actually represent a step backwards ethically in terms of the numbers of animals that we’re, rearing for food.

And I get that it’s a little esoteric to think about insect suffering. But you know, I think that it’s something anyone can bring themselves to relate to. If you think,  you wouldn’t want to find  your kid picking the legs off a spider or something, you would think that’s kind of mean. And like that, you know, like, we’re speaking about the scale insensitivity before; you would need potentially trillions of insects in order to produce like a decent quantity of food  globally.

So yeah, I think that the ethical implications of that could be pretty dire.

Marina Schmidt

Mm. Yeah. And then probably it’s also important to add to that the consideration of how environmentally unfriendly the meat is because with the environmental damage there’s another layer of harm added to it. So as beef is environmentally even less sustainable it does get a few minus points again and chickens are probably more sustainable in terms of  conversion from input calories to output calories.

So it’s a, it’s a whole complicated mess. Let’s just, let’s just stop this. Let’s just move on. Let’s go plant-based and cultured and then we don’t need to worry about this.

Chris Bryant

That’s right. Yeah, we can we needn’t be counting the billions of animals. If we just move away from eating them altogether. Uh, I think that’s going to be best.

Marina Schmidt

Well, Chris, how can listeners connect with you?

Chris Bryant

I am on LinkedIn is probably the kind of professional space that I’m most active. You can find me on LinkedIn, if you search for Chris Bryant. I guess  I have a LinkedIn URL that I could.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, well, we will put Chris’s LinkedIn profile and contact details on our website, redtogreen.solutions. And you will find everything if you click on this episode.

Chris Bryant

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, that’s much better than me trying to read out all of the numbers in my URL here.

Marina Schmidt

Thanks Chris, for being on Red to Green.

Chris Bryant

Thanks so much, Marina. It was a pleasure.

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