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Why I’m optimistic about cultivated meat (and a suggestion for the frontier labs)
In my first “Meat Matters” substack, I wrote that despite some recent popular press obituaries, I remain optimistic about the scientific viability of cultivated meat, and I spelled out why.
Here’s the executive summary:
In less than a decade, costs have fallen by orders of magnitude, government funding and scientific progress have surged, and multiple companies report that they are within striking distance of price parity. In short: The science and engineering challenges will not require inconceivably difficult breakthroughs or AGI, and of the dozens of cultivated meat scientists and engineers I spoke with for my new book Meat, all of them are optimistic about our path forward.
Zak Weston from Food System Innovations (FSI) works on market shaping for FSI and has personally reviewed techno-economic analyses from five different cultivated meat companies. He says that those analyses show “that at current cell line and media performance, if produced in commercial-scale facilities, they could reach cost parity or cost advantage compared to their animal meat benchmark.”
In Zak's view (and mine), “the technological progress over the past few years has been remarkable.”
Click here to read the full piece, and if you'd like to receive a monthly dose of optimism and urgency related to alternative meats, please subscribe.
Although I'm optimistic about getting cultivated meat to price parity with the full range of conventional meats, I don't think it's going to be easy, and I do think there’s a good chance that we could fail.
If we fail, though, it will be because we didn't bring the will, not because the scientific and engineering challenges were insurmountable.
It’s also worth noting that every second, the world slaughters 2,800 land animals and 4,100 farmed fin fish. That number has been going up every single year since FAO started measuring, in 1961.
So even if solving cultivated meat will happen eventually, solving it quicker matters. A lot.
Our current path forward involves two vectors:
With the budgets, expertise, and connections of the frontier labs, the fundamental science and engineering roadmap for cheap cultivated meat could be created and then handed to the world.
With some additional resources, the labs could accelerate the current start-ups and launch new ones, creating a robust cultivated meat industry.
If you’re at one of the frontier labs and would like to discuss making this happen, please get in touch.
Thanks for this post. I don't want to be annoying, so feel free to ignore this if it would take too much of your time to answer, but I'm curious whether anyone has modeled the end-to-end cost of testing this theory of change end-to-end.
For example:
a) Accelerating the remaining R&D needed for scalable solutions
b) Developing a product that's genuinely competitive on taste
c) Securing a mass-market deal in one country, e.g., getting the product into a major supermarket chain at price parity with meat (with funders subsidizing the difference to test the hypothesis), plus the marketing to support it
Put differently: if a funder asked you or someone in the space, "What would it take to test this ToC, and how would you design the test?", what would we tell them?
Part of why I ask is that from the outside, this space can be hard to navigate. Many companies are raising money, and each makes a plausible case for what it could do with more funding. I understand GFI's model is to support the ecosystem broadly rather than back specific companies, but I wonder whether there's a role for identifying the 1–3 most promising bets closest to a real market test, mapping out their pathways and costs, and helping match them with funding. Or perhaps that's already part of what you do?