I think cultivated meat could be a game-changer. It seems to have a clear route to competing with the most expensive animal products (think foie gras or bluefin tuna) and to improving plant-based meats as an additive at a low percentage. But the biggest prize would be if cultivated meat could compete with cheap animal products at scale. We commissioned this report because we’re uncertain about whether cultivated meat can reach that price point.
The report outlines a number of major technical challenges to lowering the cost of cultivated meat. I encourage people to read the whole report. But the tl;dr is that growing animal cells in bulk is really hard, and in particular constraints on bioreactor size and sterility make this really challenging. As a result, you should probably be skeptical of claims that cultivated meat will be price-competitive at scale within the next decade.
I think how much the report should update you beyond that depends on your priors, and what they’re based on. For someone who thinks, based on media articles or some general intuition like Moore’s Law, that it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will become price-competitive, this might be a pretty large negative update. But for a scientist at a cultivated meat startup this probably isn’t much of an update at all.
My biggest takeaway is that we need more publicly available work on the science of cultivated meat. Because most of the research is being done by startups who need to protect their IP, not much gets published. So I’d love to see this paper serving as one input in an ongoing scientific discussion, rather than being the final word. In that vein, I recommend this Techno-economic assessment of animal cell-based meat, published last year by UC Davis scientists. And I’m looking forward to a similar assessment that GFI commissioned, which should be released any day now.
Otherwise I feel pretty unsure on the right takeaways / way forward. This does make me more pessimistic that startups can reach cost-competitiveness within a time frame that investors will accept — though it’s possible they’ll find a business model in competing with pricier animal products or blending with plant-based. And I think it suggests the need to diversify approaches, e.g. in also pursuing plant-based and fermentation approaches, and moral advocacy, given there’s no one sure silver bullet here. But it also makes me think there’s greater importance to more patient academic research on cultivated meat, since it suggests a longer timeline and the potential payoff remains huge.
For someone who thinks, based on media articles or some general intuition like Moore’s Law, that it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will become price-competitive, this might be a pretty large negative update. But for a scientist at a cultivated meat startup this probably isn’t much of an update at all.
I should probably read the report, but it isn’t clear from your comment or the report abstract if the difficulties are such that cultivated meat will likely never be price-competitive with cheap animal products at scale, or if it is still inevitable that this will happen but that it will likely be much later than most people thought. Which is more accurate? I’d imagine it will still happen eventually (even if this takes decades/centuries)?
I think this is an important distinction. Someone with longtermist leanings might argue that it seems more important that price-competitiveness at scale ever happens, than that it happens at some point in the nearish future.
Yeah I agree that’s a critical question. I don’t think it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will be price-competitive with cheap animal products at scale one day, but I also don’t think it’s impossible. So it’s a question of what probability to attach to that outcome and on what timeline. I feel very unsure on that.
I’d love to see more people making predictions on this and debating the likely solvability of specific challenges identified in the report. One place for making predictions is this Metaculus series which we commissioned (though note most predictions were placed before the report above was published and I don’t know how much technical knowledge they’re based on).
Would love to see an answer to this. The report is pessimistic, but it’s unclear if it’s never or 50 years. I hope Lewis will get back to this question!
Thanks for the question Michael. A few thoughts:
I think cultivated meat could be a game-changer. It seems to have a clear route to competing with the most expensive animal products (think foie gras or bluefin tuna) and to improving plant-based meats as an additive at a low percentage. But the biggest prize would be if cultivated meat could compete with cheap animal products at scale. We commissioned this report because we’re uncertain about whether cultivated meat can reach that price point.
The report outlines a number of major technical challenges to lowering the cost of cultivated meat. I encourage people to read the whole report. But the tl;dr is that growing animal cells in bulk is really hard, and in particular constraints on bioreactor size and sterility make this really challenging. As a result, you should probably be skeptical of claims that cultivated meat will be price-competitive at scale within the next decade.
I think how much the report should update you beyond that depends on your priors, and what they’re based on. For someone who thinks, based on media articles or some general intuition like Moore’s Law, that it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will become price-competitive, this might be a pretty large negative update. But for a scientist at a cultivated meat startup this probably isn’t much of an update at all.
My biggest takeaway is that we need more publicly available work on the science of cultivated meat. Because most of the research is being done by startups who need to protect their IP, not much gets published. So I’d love to see this paper serving as one input in an ongoing scientific discussion, rather than being the final word. In that vein, I recommend this Techno-economic assessment of animal cell-based meat, published last year by UC Davis scientists. And I’m looking forward to a similar assessment that GFI commissioned, which should be released any day now.
Otherwise I feel pretty unsure on the right takeaways / way forward. This does make me more pessimistic that startups can reach cost-competitiveness within a time frame that investors will accept — though it’s possible they’ll find a business model in competing with pricier animal products or blending with plant-based. And I think it suggests the need to diversify approaches, e.g. in also pursuing plant-based and fermentation approaches, and moral advocacy, given there’s no one sure silver bullet here. But it also makes me think there’s greater importance to more patient academic research on cultivated meat, since it suggests a longer timeline and the potential payoff remains huge.
I should probably read the report, but it isn’t clear from your comment or the report abstract if the difficulties are such that cultivated meat will likely never be price-competitive with cheap animal products at scale, or if it is still inevitable that this will happen but that it will likely be much later than most people thought. Which is more accurate? I’d imagine it will still happen eventually (even if this takes decades/centuries)?
I think this is an important distinction. Someone with longtermist leanings might argue that it seems more important that price-competitiveness at scale ever happens, than that it happens at some point in the nearish future.
Yeah I agree that’s a critical question. I don’t think it’s inevitable that cultivated meat will be price-competitive with cheap animal products at scale one day, but I also don’t think it’s impossible. So it’s a question of what probability to attach to that outcome and on what timeline. I feel very unsure on that.
I’d love to see more people making predictions on this and debating the likely solvability of specific challenges identified in the report. One place for making predictions is this Metaculus series which we commissioned (though note most predictions were placed before the report above was published and I don’t know how much technical knowledge they’re based on).
Would love to see an answer to this. The report is pessimistic, but it’s unclear if it’s never or 50 years. I hope Lewis will get back to this question!