Who is afraid of cell-cultured meat ...and who has stake in the petri protein business?
Who is afraid of Cell-Cultured Meat?
Pioneers always face negative press, especially when they threaten to disrupt the traditional existing incumbents businesses. Its no different for the pioneers of petri dish 'meats', who are frightening three groups in particular. Meat companies are concerned, seeing it as a threat to their long-term business, although several are now investing in it as a defensive move. Human health experts are as well. Nutritionists are concerned that humans have consumed meat, milk and eggs from animals for a million years and they wonder what will the effect of cultured proteins will have on us and on our gut microflora if we switch? Doctors wonder about the risks of antibiotic resistance. The third group, experts in sustainability, question whether proteins grown in this way are actually better than those from traditional systems, given the current requirement to harvest stem cells from animals, with current production systems require the slaughter of several animals to arrive at a single burger. What cannot be doubted is that these cell cultured proteins, deemed a top ten technology of 2018, are one of the most talked about and controversial areas of agriculture.
What is cell-cultured agriculture?
Emerging from the field of regenerative medicine, cell samples are used to grow tissues and whole organs in the laboratory for transplanting into the human body. Cell samples are now being used to culture and grow fat and muscle for food, leather, collagen for cosmetics and more. Advocates call it ‘clean meat’, which is deliberately contentious, or in vitro meat, which doesn’t particularly sound appealing.
A small amount of tissue cells is extracted from animals through a minor biopsy and placed in a solution of chemical nutrients that grows and multiplies, forming the same tissue as the animal. Scientists place animal stem cells into a vat with a scaffold and grow it with proteins and a culture. Scaling the process is compared to fermenting beer in bioreactors. But, instead of growing a whole live-cow, chicken, or fish, scientists only grow the part of the animal we eat.
Mark Post, at Maastricht University, first created and showcased cultured-meat hamburger in 2013. Since then, others have developed cultured meat prototypes and while substantial financial investment has been pumped into these new startups, getting the final products across the finish line has been difficult for a number of reasons—cost being the primary one.
Supporters of cultured meat are motivated by a number of reasons–ecological, ethical, technological, and economic. Modern agriculture is under pressure to reduce its environmental footprint while meeting the colliding expectations of consumer groups, trade organizations and governments.
Indeed, there is pressure. World population will morph by another 1 billion people (total 8.5 billion worldwide) in just 10 years. Governments, NGOs and investors are looking for sustainable solutions to how to feed people in the future. Lab grown meat, more than any other alternative proteins, seem a great candidate, but the reality of these proteins still has a long way to go.
The challenges of cell-culture proteins
Cost remains the most prohibitive factors of scaling this-up. Mosa Meat produced its first beef patty at a whopping $325,000 (financed by Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin). It says it is focusing on getting the price of a burger below $12.
Most of the preliminary success of lab-grown meat was developed using fetal bovine serum (FBS), a nutrient-rich blood extracted from unborn calves which contains a variety of growth factors, hormones, and necessary components needed for cell survival. The serum is expensive and requires the slaughter of the donor animals, weakening a major reason advocates say they are pursuing cell-cultured meats.
Companies are working on new (plant-based) media to replace FBS or say they have already found another way to grow the cells that mimic the role blood plays in helping cells proliferate and are working to optimize it. It isn’t an easy endeavor, which is why it hasn’t been accomplished yet.
Peter Verstrate, CEO of Mosa Meat is the most forthcoming and realistic about the challenges startups face in bringing cultured meat to the marketplace. He says they must:
Significantly reduce production costs
Optimize the growth medium
Scale production
It is estimated that startups require $200 million to develop a product, with a further $85-170 million for packaging, marketing and regulatory work.
Mosa Meats intends to build a 10,000 to 25,000-liter bioreactor with the capacity to produce over 100 tons of cultured hamburger meat annually by 2021. In the US alone, 40 million tons of meat is consumed annually. Mosa Meat’s 100 tons (200,000 lbs) of cultured meat would barely supply 0.00025 percent of the US demand. And at this rate, it will take a lot of production plants – 400,000 –to replace the US meat industry to satisfy the US demand. To compete with poultry rather than beef will require lab meat to be even cheaper.
Factoring in these costs, with so many unknowns, even if they can get there, the product may not reach the market for many years. Yet numerous entrants are all striving to get in.
The Major Players in Cell-Cultured Agriculture
Funded by philanthropists, Big ag, pharmaceutical, investment firms and governments, more than 30 start-up companies around the world are aggressively pursuing lab-grown products.
Memphis Meats (California) is funded by Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Kimball Musk, IndieBio, New Crop Capital, and two of the top US meat producers– Cargill and Tyson. Memphis has cultivated and harvested a successful prototype for a beef meatball, beef fajita, chicken and duck in its bioreactors and expects to have a product in stores by 2021. Memphis is considered by observers to be the furthest along to getting cell-cultured proteins to market, both in scale up and price. Today it reports production costs at $2,400 per pound, but hopes to have it under $5, within five years.
JUST (California) already has a distribution pipeline in place for its vegan products, such as mayonnaise made from split peas and scrambled eggs made from mung beans. It intends to have the first cultured-meat on the market before the end of 2018, but given obstacles with scaling and regulation, their timeline appears ambitious.
Future Meat Technologies (Israel) is founded by experts in tissue-regenerative medicine and it plans to equip small businesses, and eventually consumers, with bioreactors to produce their own cultured-meat using capsules containing starter tissue supplied by Future Meat. It also licensed the technology to SuperMeat. Tyson and several local and global investment groups support them financially.
SuperMeat (Israel) in working with Hebrew University, used crowdfunding to raise the money needed to launch its company in the development of cell-cultured chicken breast, liver, and minced-chicken products. Germany’s largest poultry company PHW Group is a major investor.
Integriculture (Japan) is pioneering a flow-based, scalable cell-cultured system using a low-cost culture medium. Supported by the its government and several other investors, it created a non-profit venture,
Shojinmeat Project to open-source, citizen science and acclimate future generations toward a meatless future. They’ve given high school students access to the basic equipment needed to culture animal cells at home in an attempt to foster curiosity and acceptance.
Several other early-stage companies include: Kiran Meats (California), Mission Barns(California), Higher Steaks (United Kingdom), Balletic Foods (California), New Age Meats (California), BioFood Systems (Israel) and Aleph Farms (Israel), which is developing 3D technology to culture beef.
Focusing on meats other than beef and chicken, several companies are challenging the aquaculture and fishing industries. Finless Foods was the first to enter the cell-cultured seafood arena and hopes to serve up bluefin tuna from the lab by 2019. The Wild Type is focusing on salmon, while SEAFUTURE and BlueNalu are fairly new on the scene, but recently secured $4.5 million seed round funding for cellular aquaculture.
Even the pet food industry is seeing competition. Wild Earth is developing a cell-cultured protein for pets using human-grade fungi. Future products will contain cultured meat from animal cells. It plans to release its first pet treat product in 2019. Similarly, Bond Pet Foods is also working with fungi to develop cell-cultured meat product for pets.
Improving Human Health and the Environment?
Cultured meat claims it can help us address several environmental and health concerns attributed to modern meat production: animal welfare, greenhouse gas reduction, antibiotic use, animal to human disease transmission, food-borne illness and feeding a rapidly expanding world population. Additionally, researchers say they can easily infuse cultured meat with vitamins and minerals that are not found in natural meat, thus improving human health. Firstly, this is yet to be seen and only will truly be realized if the products are ever brought to market in a consumer-acceptable way. Secondly, it is becoming increasingly well known that the more diverse a person’s diet, the more diverse the microflora in their gut, and we do not yet know to what effect eating synthetic meats affects this.
An early and often cited Oxford study (2011) suggests that cell-cultured meat will significantly lower global greenhouse-gas emissions and water consumption. While a more recent (2018) study takes a closer look at how the chemical and mechanical process of production would replace biological systems (animals). Industrial energy consumption could actually increase. Everything grown in a factory must be sterilized to avoid contamination with harmful microbes – in fact according to Frank Mitloehner of UC Davis the meat itself is “floating in a lake of antibiotics.” Let’s see how that fact affects those keen to push the antibiotic free movement.
Likewise, calculating the environmental impacts of large-scale in vitro meat is complex; It depends on the level of adoption; the amount of energy used for production (both heating water and using chemicals for sterilization require a great deal of energy); cultivation methods; the shifting patterns of livestock production; and the materials that will replace animal byproducts used to make an array of other products. Further blurring perceivable gains are shifts in other areas, like expansion of biofuel production, that could offset decreases in required agricultural land, and what to do with the forages and fiber that ruminant animals can uniquely digest.
Likely projections suggest that the environmental impact will be positive, but it may be years before we fully know the true costs and real repercussions of these new proteins.
Regulatory Hoops & What to Call it
When asked, consumers say they want clear labeling and transparency about how cultured-meat is produced. Cell-cultured agriculture does not fit neatly into current statutory and regulatory definitions of food and industry regulators are not yet prepared for commercial production. It’s unlikely that the agencies will rule on terminology that can be used to describe, and market, cultured ‘meat’ until the technology is more fully developed.
European Union countries will be regulated by the EU Novel Foods Regulation, which already has established some standards so product developers can collect the data needed for approval. In the US the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and USDA share duties on food inspection with the FDA overseeing as much as 80 percent of food products, but USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is in charge of traditional meat products such as beef, pork and poultry. The advent of cell-cultured meat could create a regulatory turf battle as cell-cultured companies want to go through the FDA in charge while livestock groups prefer the USDA. Conventional meat producers don’t especially care what it’s called, so long as it doesn’t contain the word “meat,” which they believe should be reserved to describe “once-live” animals.
Will Consumers Eat it?
Lab meat proponents and investors are striving to create a new culture and narrative around meat. Yes, the alternative protein market will most likely continue to grow and eventually see wider acceptance, if for no other reason than the population is rising and with it the percentage of people who seek alternative meat proteins.
Consumers face a psychological hurdle— the idea of eating something started in a petri dish. Recent polling found that nearly one quarter of people don’t know what cultured meat is and over 57% said they would refuse to eat it. Other reasons given included:
Don’t trust it (52%)
It’s not natural (44%)
It doesn’t seem healthy (38%)
Concerns about taste and texture (29%)
Don’t know how it’s made (36%)
Fascinatingly, the US study reported 37% were concerned that lab-grown meat will hurt a farmer’s livelihood, which will be interesting to see how that plays out on a global level. The message is: Cell-cultured meat people have a big job ahead of them in educating the population about their product and at current price points, a very long road ahead to reach a consumer tipping point.
The Path Forward
An extensive report by Beef + Lamb New Zealand, reviewed the rise of alternative proteins and implications for the red meat sector, offering strategic suggestions as to how the meat market could grow including product innovation, premiumization, diversification and expansion. CoBank feels the competitive impact of cultured meat on conventional livestock industry will be minimal in the short-term. Add to that the USDA is predicting record highs for meat consumption in the US in 2018: averaging 222.8 pounds (100 Kg) of meat per person and a growing global middle class means the appetite for meat grows worldwide.
Lab cultured meat may not be as disruptive to the meat industry as some may think. As we have seen, the path ahead for cultured-meat advocates is difficult, costly and time-consuming. Cultured muscle probably won’t supplant meat from conventional sources. Consider:
Can we use forage otherwise or would it be wasted? Livestock production remains one of the only ways to convert grasses and fiber into food. Brian Ford articulates it well, “Conventional agriculture is a crucial component of land management, and our environment will depend upon the raising of grazing animals as much in the future as it has done in the past.”
As we learn more about the human microflora, and its influence on health, immunity and longevity consider the question; which is more likely to generate a diverse microbiota? It seems likely diets including milk, meat and eggs are more likely to do so than isolating and growing cells in a sterile environment.
Are consumers really ready to pay the difference? Particularly considering that the lower price point of white meats gives lab meat companies a lower price point to reach to appeal to consumers.
Farmers and food companies need to focus on improving agriculture’s production efficiencies and sustainable practices, so when given the choice consumers favor traditional grown meat to the lab grown alternative, the meat sector is able to compete through increased efficiencies, including the use of technology (see options for beef, poultry and pig) and precision nutrition programs such as those created through nutrigenomics.
Many thanks to Kathryn White at Communicationworx and Alexa Potocki for their contributions.
