Thanks James—a few things to add to the discussion below:
On market failure: Alt protein R&D budgets have contracted significantly as the investment environment has tightened. Company incentives are much more geared toward extracting value from existing science than toward investing in long-horizon, early-technology-readiness-level research. Even where capital exists, investors aren’t well-placed to identify the best marginal taste R&D—and their picks aren’t always aligned with maximum reduction in animal suffering (e.g. beef flavour research vs. chicken flavour research).
On timelines: The R&D that maximises near-term sales for a single firm isn’t the same as the R&D that’s best for the market long-term—especially for pre-competitive science where you can’t capture the full value. Eg. it makes much more commercial sense to do R&D on a new SKU than to invest in uncertain, harder-to-organise off-flavour work.
On $10M: Fair to be sceptical. The claim isn’t that $10M fixes the whole problem—it’s that (i) specific problems are neglected even relative to the few hundred million spent on alt protein R&D annually, and (ii) progress on the margin could drive more substitution away from the most numerous farmed animals.
On taste as a predictor of uptake: Genuinely hard to measure cleanly in a way that would satisfy most EAs. For what it’s worth, on my model of taste—roughly (i) what does the analytical chemistry suggest about similarity to meat, and (ii) what does sensory panel data suggest—you do see something in the direction of more sales, though getting clean signal is hard given the difficulty of controlling for other uptake levers like distribution factors and portfolio depth.
Thanks James—a few things to add to the discussion below:
On market failure: Alt protein R&D budgets have contracted significantly as the investment environment has tightened. Company incentives are much more geared toward extracting value from existing science than toward investing in long-horizon, early-technology-readiness-level research. Even where capital exists, investors aren’t well-placed to identify the best marginal taste R&D—and their picks aren’t always aligned with maximum reduction in animal suffering (e.g. beef flavour research vs. chicken flavour research).
On timelines: The R&D that maximises near-term sales for a single firm isn’t the same as the R&D that’s best for the market long-term—especially for pre-competitive science where you can’t capture the full value. Eg. it makes much more commercial sense to do R&D on a new SKU than to invest in uncertain, harder-to-organise off-flavour work.
On $10M: Fair to be sceptical. The claim isn’t that $10M fixes the whole problem—it’s that (i) specific problems are neglected even relative to the few hundred million spent on alt protein R&D annually, and (ii) progress on the margin could drive more substitution away from the most numerous farmed animals.
On taste as a predictor of uptake: Genuinely hard to measure cleanly in a way that would satisfy most EAs. For what it’s worth, on my model of taste—roughly (i) what does the analytical chemistry suggest about similarity to meat, and (ii) what does sensory panel data suggest—you do see something in the direction of more sales, though getting clean signal is hard given the difficulty of controlling for other uptake levers like distribution factors and portfolio depth.