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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mosa Meats

Study: Consumers Willing to Pay 37 Percent More for Cultured Meat

A new study from Maastricht University (UM), where Dr. Mark Post created the world’s first cultured hamburger in 2013, suggests that consumers are willing to pay a premium for cell-based meat.

The study, published in PLOSONE this week, was based on a tasting that UM scientists held for 193 consumers in the Netherlands. It’s the first study on consumer reactions to cell-based meat that included a physical product to taste. The participants were first given a presentation on cultured meat, including the science behind its production and its environmental benefits. They were then given two samples of hamburger, one labeled ‘conventional’ and the other ‘cultured.” However, in reality both were traditional beef burgers.

Even though the samples were identical, all participants rated the flavor of the so-called ‘cultured’ hamburger higher than the ‘conventional’ one. Afterwards 58 percent of the tasters said they would be willing to pay extra — an average premium of 37 percent — for cultured meat.

The participants also noted that their main deciding factor to determine how much more they’d pay for cultured meat was information. The more they knew about the process behind cell-based meat production — and its global societal and environmental impact — the more they were willing to pay for it.

The study also delves a bit into the idea of disgust, which is often more dependent on cultural norms than actual taste (ex. Westerners won’t eat bugs, even though they’re super sustainable). Disgust is certainly one of the bigger challenges that cultured meat will face when it gets to market. Companies have to convince consumers to not only sample this newfangled product — meat grown from cells in bioreactors — but, at least initially, they’ll also have to pay more for it.

“The study shows… that consumers will eat cultured meat if they are served it,” Post noted in an email sent to The Spoon. Not only that, they might even be willing to fork over more money for it. That is, as long as they’re provided with enough information to understand what exactly cell-based meat is, and why it could be an appealing option.

Of course, when cultured meat does eventually hit the market — likely a few years from now in restaurants, a decade from now in supermarkets — companies won’t be able to sit down every consumer and give them a presentation on why it’s a good option for the planet. Instead, they’ll have to rely on marketing to get the word out. Maybe even rope in some high-profile celebrity and chef endorsers like Beyond Meat has done.

They’ll also likely have to face negative campaigns from Big Meat and its friends. The CCF, a lobbying agency with ties to meat corporations, has already aired harsh commercials tearing down plant-based meat. When cultured meat — which is actual animal tissue, just grown outside the animal — becomes available, you can bet that Big Meat will come out swinging. At that point, information (and misinformation) will become all the more important.

Lab-Grown Meat Just Got Another Shot of Investment

This week, Tyson Foods’ venture capital arm invested an undisclosed sum into San Francisco-based Memphis Meats, who is one of a few different companies developing lab-grown, cultured-meat alternatives.

Tyson joins DFJ Venture Capital, Bill Gates, Atomico, billionaires Suzy and Jack Welch, and several other investors. Those parties, along with heavyweight food producer Cargill, led a Series A funding round for Memphis Meats this past August that totaled $22 million.

Memphis Meats unveiled the world’s first cultured meatball in 2016, which was followed by the world’s first cultured poultry in 2017. The goal behind such products, along with those from companies like Mosa Meats, Finless Foods, SuperMeat, and Hampton Creek, is to offer consumers all the benefits of real meat without the environmental damages and foodborne illnesses associated with it.

To get it’s product, Memphis Meats uses on an ingredient called fetal bovine serum, a fascinating and slightly gross substance extracted from cow fetuses. The process of using fetal bovine serum won’t win the vegans over anytime soon, but it does enable the creation of an animal protein without the greenhouse gasses, deforestation, and host of other issues associated with raising livestock.

But cultured meat is expensive to produce, whether using fetal bovine serum or an animal-free method, as Memphis Meats is purportedly working on. Consider Mosa’s 1.2 million-per-pound lab-grown burger unveiled in 2013. And while the price of cultured meat is said to have dropped 99% since then, it’s still not low enough to make these products truly scalable (unless you’re okay with $6,000 chickens).

It’s technology that will eventually enable that scale. SuperMeat, for example, is developing technology to eliminate the need for animal serum. Finless Foods, meanwhile, has slashed prices by 50 percent and plans to have an affordable lab-grown bluefin tuna available by 2019. Memphis Meats aims to bring its product to market in 2021.

Lower costs will also make cultured meat a more realistic competitor to traditional meat products. Consumers spend about $1 trillion on meat globally, and demand is expected to double over the next few decades. Many are also betting on taste as the element that will convince traditional meat eaters to try alternatives. But it seems likely that alternative-meat producers will also need to offer competitively priced products in order to entice grill masters, tailgaters, and other die-hards.

I expect the future of alterna meat will be a combination of both lab-grown and plant-based products. Tyson’s investment in Memphis Meats also suggests we may see some acquisitions in the future, as more and more companies look to combine traditional meat products with science and technology to give the world its much-needed calories.