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.
An ITN project for Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s life sciences divisions (and Google DeepMind)
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:
- startups, which are doing incredibly well, especially considering how little has been spent on the project; right now is a great time to invest, since the top startups in cultivated meat are drastically undervalued.
- open access science, which is making great progress, especially considering the relative dearth of resources.
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?
Not annoying at all - thank you so much for engaging!
Let me start with your points a) and b)
- Accelerating the remaining R&D needed for scalable solutions.
- Developing a product that's genuinely competitive on taste
That sounds easy, but it’s actually incredibly difficult.
Two of GFI’s first six employees were scientists (the other four: policy, communications, development, operations), and their first mandate was to figure out exactly what needed to happen for plant-based and cultivated meat to reach price and taste parity, i.e., what are the things we need to solve, and what’s the TRL for each of those things?
It turned out that there was just way too much that we didn't know. It was surprising to me to realize that there was a lot more in that category on the plant-based side than on the cultivated side. But for both technologies, there were just too many known unknowns (and also unknown unknowns) for us to even speculate.
While we are now (fairly) confident that taste- and price-competitive plant-based and cultivated meat are possible, there are still some really big question marks, especially with regard to the technology that will be required to scale.
For example, on the plant-based meat side, there are some ingredients that are essential to taste (etc. - the full organoleptic experience) parity but that it may be impossible to scale up in a cost-effective manner. e.g., coconut oil and synthetic heme - there are quite literally not enough coconuts on the planet for the scale we'd need. We need alternatives, but we don't know what it's going to cost to make those alternatives, and there aren't nearly enough scientists working on these problems.
Cultivated meat: It seems likely that we are ready now on the private sector side, as I discussed in my first “Meat Matters” substack. That’s great, and I hope those companies will get the investment (or loans) they need to scale. Or that Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind will work with them to make it happen.
We may also be there on the open access side, but I doubt it.
Our science team is working on a technical roadmap that will either answer or point toward answers w/r/t both plant-based and cultivated meat (it's called the "technical roadmap," and it'll be out soon). After a bit more than 10 years of working on the issues, we think we have enough information that it's worth sharing what we know and having it pressure-tested and built upon by the broader community of people working on science and engineering around alternative meats.
This is part of why I noted in my piece that if someone from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind wants to work to make this happen, they should get in touch. I have some other ideas, too, and generally think that AI could seriously accelerate the answers to your questions.
***
Regarding your point 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.
Zak Weston from Food System Innovations is working on a project that’s similar (not identical, but same basic concept) to what you describe, and he is talking with funders.
Since he’s working with the companies in question, the information is proprietary.
This is another area where Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google DeepMind could be incredibly valuable - working with the closest alt meat companies to get over the taste and price finish line.
I have some other ideas, too, and generally think that AI could seriously accelerate the answers to your questions.
***
This has historically been outside GFI’s remit, mostly b/c we try to focus on things for which there’s not a strong private sector incentive. Thinking in terms of the counterfactual, it’s felt to us like there’s sufficient incentive for the startups in the space to do this on their own, so with limited resources, we have not focused on it.
That said, we’ve been rethinking that POV in the face of evidence that the startups don’t have the bandwidth for this either, and they’re not in the best position to ask for philanthropic (or similar) capital; that’s better done out of an NGO.
So there are some projects at GFI that point in the same direction, and it’s something more and more people across GFI’s offices are looking at.
Thanks for engaging - I appreciate it!