RE: The Sunday Times16 May 2021 11:27
pt 2
Agronomics estimates the size of the opportunity to be $5 trillion (£3.5 trillion) and last week raised £62 million, which it will invest over the next nine months.
The story of cultured meat goes back to 2013, when Mark Post, a Maastricht University researcher, created the world’s first “in vitro burger”. The cost: $325,000. This showed what was possible, but it was not until three years later that the first culture meat start-ups were founded by Post (Mosa Meat) and Uma Valeti, a cardiologist, who created Upside Foods — or Memphis Meats as it was known until last week. Valeti said: “Back then, it was all in the realm of science fiction.”
Today there are over 70 companies across Asia, Europe and America working on everything from salmon to lobster, and pork belly to bacon, beef, duck and chicken. The boom has been driven by synthetic biology, which takes an engineering approach to cells, pinpointing the ones necessary to grow a desired meat and then instructing them to produce muscle, fat and connective tissue by “turning on”, or off, certain proteins.
The industry has also nearly put behind it a key vulnerability: its reliance on foetal bovine serum. FBS, blood drawn from a living foetus that has been removed from a slaughtered cow, was the industry’s secret sauce because it was packed with the components required to supercharge cell growth. It was also hugely problematic for the self-styled “clean meat” industry.
After years of tinkering, FBS has largely been replaced by other plant-based proteins. The industry is also leaning into the climate change argument. A fingernail- size tissue sample can be cultured into 7,000 pounds of beef within six weeks. A cow eats, burps and poops for 28 months before it goes to slaughter.
The meat lobby is not standing idly by. Cattle ranchers have helped pass laws in seven states restricting the use of the words “meat” and “beef” to describe plant-based and cultured alternatives.
Another challenge is scale. Beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars to build a single manufacturing plant, the mix of nutrients to grow the cells, or media, as they are known, are costly, accounting for 99 per cent of material costs. Slashing prices or finding alternatives will be key to reaching “griddle parity”.
What appears certain is that great fortunes will be made — and lost. Mellon said: “None of these companies existed until a few years ago. None of them has ever turned a profit ... [But] I don’t doubt that the industry will succeed — it’s a question of who will succeed in it.”
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