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from the how-much-of-a-premium-would-YOU-pay? dept.
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
Splashy headlines have long overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and economics. Now, extensive new research suggests the industry may be on a billion-dollar crash course with reality.
[...] [In March], the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.
In the press push that followed, GFI claimed victory. "New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030," it trumpeted, suggesting that a new era of cheap, accessible cultured protein is rapidly approaching. The finding is critical for GFI and its allies. If private, philanthropic, and public sector investors are going to put money into cell-cultured meat, costs need to come down quickly. Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.
[...] [Dr. Paul Wood] couldn't believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI's TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI's analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he's worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI's report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
[...] In fact, GFI was well aware of Wood's line of criticism. Several months earlier, Open Philanthropy—a multi-faceted research and investment entity with a nonprofit grant-making arm, which is also one of GFI's biggest funders—completed a much more robust TEA of its own, one that concluded cell-cultured meat will likely never be a cost-competitive food. David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was "hard to find an angle that wasn't a ludicrous dead end."
Related:
Lab-Grown Pork Closer to Reality
Lab-Grown Chicken (and Duck) Could be on the Menu in 4 Years
Cargill, Bill Gates, Richard Branson Backed Memphis Meats Expects Meat From Cells in Stores by 2021
'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist Mulls 'Taboo Against Cannibalism' Ending as Lab-Grown Meat Improves
Artificial Meat: UK Scientists Growing 'Bacon' in Labs
Impossible Foods CEO Ponders Fake Imaginary Meat
KFC is Working with a Russian 3D Bioprinting Firm to Try to Make Lab-Produced Chicken Nuggets
Gen Z Not Ready to Eat Lab-Grown Meat
No-Kill, Lab-Grown Meat to Go on Sale for First Time
Singapore Approves a Lab-Grown Meat Product, a Global First
Growth Industries: Lab-Grown Structures and Meats
Paris-Based Company Gourmey Hopes Ethical Lab-Grown Foie Gras Will Overcome Bans
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday September 27 2021, @03:11AM (5 children)
You can't tell what changes will happen in the future. You can reasonably say "Our models project...", but your models contain specific assumptions that may not be valid. Always. One can't rule out wild developments, from nano-assemblers to new diseases that make growing animals hideously expensive. It may be reasonable to say "we give those chances a low probability", but that's a very different statement.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @03:39AM
You can sweat handwaving as much as you want if this is what pleases you.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday September 27 2021, @12:41PM (2 children)
David Humbird's Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat: Techno-Economic Analysis and Due Diligence [engrxiv.org] is aiming at $25/kg and still struggles to break the barrier even when considering theoretically possible breakthroughs in the leveraging of low-cost plant protein hydrolysates (i.e. soy) which haven't been made yet but might happen and assuming that it might be possible to somehow workaround the need for white room level sanitary conditions. If you go beyond what current theory allows and start bending the rules, you'll start introducing processes that will just further upset the viability of cultured meat. e.g. take slurry and 3d printing: Karna Ramachandraiah's Potential Development of Sustainable 3D-Printed Meat Analogues: A Review [mdpi.com] suggests you can spray dry slurry, reconstitute into denser 3d printer canisters fills, and stack neat 3d printed lines to create meat-like textures. The problem is, of course, why wouldn't you do the same with cheaper egg albumin, whey powders, or even cheaper vegetable proteins like soy, pea or gluten?
Then there's that $25/kg mark. If the bovine and poultry industries get pressured on the dollar, they won't just sit there with their thumbs on their asses. Most of them are 50 years behind technological development since limited land pastors, transportation costs and international tariffs and taxes on food imports guarantee a few key players a natural monopoly. Pressure that and they'll just update their practices and bring the costs down.
And we haven't even mentioned fish and insect protein farms...
Overall, in theory growing protein in tanks similar to beer fermentation is the most efficient way to go about food-grade protein production. But between costs, form, texture and alternatives, you'll need a lot of breakthroughs to get there. So, absolutely not by 2030. Surely not by 2040... Maybe by 2050?
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 27 2021, @01:25PM (1 child)
Yes, that's a reasonable approach. I can't guess as to the accuracy of your timeline, but it might well be correct. Or it could stretch out over a century. OR it might actually never be possible. But making a guess as a guess with a timeline is a reasonable approach. You could even estimate probabilities, and it might well be reasonable. (I.e., they could have said "I don't think this will be practical within the current century", and while I might not have agreed, I wouldn't have said to myself "That's stupid!".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday September 27 2021, @04:51PM
You need to read the full article to realize just how nuts those marketing claims. You have multiple people from the industry itself telling you it's just insane to make claims about viability when they're still sorting out basic research while their opposition is telling them money is coming from governments and investment firms and they surely know what they're investing in... It's really at that level of stupid.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @05:02PM
You say that, but I know for an absolute fact that a computer will NEVER beat a human at Chess. The problem space is just too complicated.