I think I see what you’re getting at, let me add a couple of things:
Quorn’s mycoprotein is produced from a different microorganism (Fusarium Venenatum), with different growth rates and processing steps than baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), so you are correct. It is more expensive than yeast, and also compared to the gas-based SCPs I mentioned.
Based on a conversation I had with an ex-Quorn scientist, the wholesale selling price of Quorn products is ~$3/kg wet (which makes sense given the intensive postprocessing and other additional steps). I’m uncertain as to how it would differ from yeast when comparing them in a similar state (e.g. drying as pretty much the sole post-processing step, which is the case of the values I gave for yeast and methane-based SCP), but I imagine that even then Quorn would be at least twice the production cost of yeast/methane SCP.
A little clarification about my research: I did not run a TEA as such to calculate capital and operational expenditures of the gas-based SCP production systems. Rather, I used published values from TEAs run by SCP companies themselves as an input to my model. I used these for my goal of estimating the retail price in a catastrope and the ramp-up speed of fast construction of SCP factories in case of catastrophe.
I did not try to perform validation of the published values as I did not have access to the calculations run by those companies. Instead, I made sure that my results are robust to relatively large changes in the TEA results published by the SCP companies via sensitivity analysis. I’m happy to talk more about the methodology if you’re interested.
I think I see what you’re getting at, let me add a couple of things:
Quorn’s mycoprotein is produced from a different microorganism (Fusarium Venenatum), with different growth rates and processing steps than baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), so you are correct. It is more expensive than yeast, and also compared to the gas-based SCPs I mentioned.
Based on a conversation I had with an ex-Quorn scientist, the wholesale selling price of Quorn products is ~$3/kg wet (which makes sense given the intensive postprocessing and other additional steps). I’m uncertain as to how it would differ from yeast when comparing them in a similar state (e.g. drying as pretty much the sole post-processing step, which is the case of the values I gave for yeast and methane-based SCP), but I imagine that even then Quorn would be at least twice the production cost of yeast/methane SCP.
A little clarification about my research: I did not run a TEA as such to calculate capital and operational expenditures of the gas-based SCP production systems. Rather, I used published values from TEAs run by SCP companies themselves as an input to my model. I used these for my goal of estimating the retail price in a catastrope and the ramp-up speed of fast construction of SCP factories in case of catastrophe.
I did not try to perform validation of the published values as I did not have access to the calculations run by those companies. Instead, I made sure that my results are robust to relatively large changes in the TEA results published by the SCP companies via sensitivity analysis. I’m happy to talk more about the methodology if you’re interested.