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Some news from a company we're actually invested in:

https://meatable.com/pork-sausages/

They expect to be selling this to consumers by 2025 or sooner - note the date in your diary!

Your comments would appear that you at least share some of the same concerns I do re. exactly how ANIC are managed. You often get the feeling that just round the corner, you are about to get well and truly shafted!

I'm usually the pessimist on this board, but I think anyone who sells now is mad. Ask yourself why you bought into this share and if anything has changed. If you believe that it's at least 5 years before much happens with this (more likely 10) then who cares about a dip right now? There is always going to be short term noise with this share but big whoop. Of course there is an opportunity cost to holding, but again, that much should have been obvious when you are buying a speculative, outlandish share with zero guarantee of success. I bought into this because I hoped for a 10 - 100x return, but this hope was hugely caveated by the fact that I am prepared to lose the lot (and the percentage of my assets invested in this reflects that realism). None of this has changed. There has been announcements of progress by various companies and it all still sounds horribly expensive, but it was horribly expensive when I bought in to it, so that part of the narrative isn't changed much. Selling out for £1 sounds incredibly unambitious as far as I am concerned. For what it's worth, I'm about 20% down on my average buy in price but don't especially care! I do have a lot of concerns about this stock and how it is managed, but it's nigh on the only show in town so I'll stick with it knowing that I have factored in losing the lot. Also for what it's worth, in for a penny, in for a pound - I decided to invest a small amount in AppHarvest who do vertical farming and have a similar narrative to ANIC but obviously targetting a different foodtype. Thought it would be an interesting and complimentary addition if you believe that food security and sustainability is going to be big. That's fallen 90 odd percent from it's peak, so I'm accepting that one too is probably a basket case. Happy hunting nevertheless.

I appreciate this is only a tenuous link but interested to know if anyone has looked at any vertical farming stocks to compliment ANIC. I read in Investors Chronicle over the weekend that the yield from indoor farms is 100's times that of an outdoor farm. This sounds like a great complimentary area to ANIC but when I look at a couple of the biggest listed stocks in the US (AppHarvest: APPH and Hydrofarm Holdings: HYFM), they both shot up in price a couple of years ago and have since lost 90%+ of their value. Anyone have any thoughts - why have they plummeted since their peak. I appreciate they will be struggling due to energy costs but is their story not in many ways similar to ANIC's holdings i.e. less land usage, less water usage, less fertiliser and pesticides, bringing fresh food production directly to population centres etc. Why is this failing from an investors point of view and does anyone have any holdings they would or wouldn't recommend?

Horti - the article you posted may well have been peer reviewed, but the opening line to the abstract is not promising:

"Beyond Meat commissioned the Center for Sustainable Systems at University of Michigan to conduct a “cradle-to-distribution” life cycle assessment.................."

I've posted this link previously:

https://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/PoliticsOfProtein.pdf

There are already people out there querying the basis of claims of plant based and cultured meat products as most of the evidence of their benefits haven't been independently verified (according to the above report). There will be plenty of large food manufacturers out there who will sling mud questioning the validity of the upstarts claims. Some of that mud might stick whether or not it's true.

But if they can't defend their claims then we shouldn't pretend this is a good product and be heavily invested in it. Simples? The Emperor was finally exposed as being naked - I don't want to be the one losing my shirt if this is all smoke and mirrors.

A couple of online training courses coming up via the Institute of Chemical Engineers if you want to find out more about how the industry might achieve scale up cost effectively.

This one is free and is titled "Fermenter Pilot Plant Scale up and Protocol":
https://www.icheme.org/fermenter_protocol?dm_i=73VG,6DM7,Q66AW,QRLY,1

If you're feeling rich (and investing in ANIC hasn't cost you an arm and a leg to date....) then for £1080+VAT (for IChemE members) you could attend a more comprehensive "Scale up of Chemical Processes" training course.
https://www.icheme.org/career/training/live-online-courses/scale-up-of-chemical-processes/?dm_i=73VG,6DM7,Q66AW,QRLY,1

Just realised that the Remilk costs are not so misaligned with everyone else. The 10% market share they are talking about is equivalent to 50,000 dairy cows which is 10% of the Danish dairy herd which is probably per head larger than many European countries, but is not especially big e.g. annual milk output for Denmark is circa 6M tonnes compared to Germany annual milk output circa 33M tonnes. So $120M is getting you 10% of a relatively small number. I would still have thought there processing costs would be lower than companies doing meat etc. where there is additional steps in creating the structure of e.g. a steak.

idg69 - You could try Sartortius AG (SRT). 12 month high of 839 Euro and currently sitting at 325 Euro. They make this sort of kit.

The Remilk and GOOD Meat / Eat Just costs don't seem to align but I don't know why. Blue Nalu raised $50M or $60M to fund their pilot scale facility so approx $500M to do 30M lbs/year sounds believable (and also Upside Foods raised about that amount to build their facility capable of "10's millions" lbs/year of meat, but they also indicated part of the fund raise was allocated to developing the supply chain - it didn't say how big a part) . I can only assume that the process requirements for meat vrs. milk are substantially different to account for the vast cost difference. I am also aware that Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Eat Just has his detractors and the company has a messy history so maybe the projected costs are pessimistic based on his track record, but they do seem to be order of magnitude correct which all still points to large fund raises still to come.

I do appreciate it's not an all inclusive comparison but is there still not some merit in comparing the cost of the facility that gets the food into a format to deliver to the store? Most of the farming infrastructure to produce conventional meat and poultry is already existing, so is that not bought and paid for and reasonable to exclude from the comparison? It's certainly good that this is happening, but there is no doubt the capital cost to build these places is enormous and points to significant fund raising and dilution for ANIC shareholders still to come (not holding out too much hope that warrants will be worth much). I appreciate that there will be some economies of scale to build more of these once the design etc. is nailed for the 1st few, but that might not be huge. The labour to fabricate and the materials required will be what they will be - just because you have the design fine tuned doesn't make stainless steel cheaper or welders and fabricators work faster. The Cranswick facility I put a link to produces about 5% of UK poultry. I'd guess each chicken on average gets you 3lb of meat. Lets say the American market is roughly 5x the size of the UK market (simply based on population). So if the Cranswick facility of 1.4M birds per week is 5% of UK total and each chicken gets 3lb of usable meat, that's about 210M lbs chicken per year. The Eat Just facility will do 30M lbs per year so that's about 1/7th the capacity of Cranwick - so it would feed 0.7% of UK population or a little over 0.1% of US population. Say the Eat Just facility comes out at $500M to build, then to achieve even 10% market share you need to spend about $50B. That will be plus or minus a big percentage but no matter which lens you choose to look at this through, that's a lot of cash.

Your link didn't work for me, but for anyone else, here is an alternative telling of the same story:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Eat-Just-cultured-meat-17196579.php

To build facility capable of up to 30 million lbs per year is estimated to cost $400M to $650M. That's mind boggling expensive compared to a conventional facility. I've posted the following link before, but for some context, Cranswick in the UK increased their chicken processing capacity from 500K birds to 1.4M birds per week for £78M.

https://cranswick.plc.uk/our-story/our-sites/eye

Nevertheless it's an expensive step in the right direction.

See link - some moderately interesting and moderately balanced stuff in here:

https://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/PoliticsOfProtein.pdf

In a period of high food prices, surely the much lower hanging fruit is reducing food waste which requires behavioural change but would be more or less free. We currently throw away about 1/3 of all food.

Admiral70 - but to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, unfortunately markets can remain asleep at the wheel longer than we can remain solvent!

I think your key phrase is that this has huge potential but there is an equally huge difference in converting that potential into cold hard profit and in the current environment the market is punishing jam tomorrow stocks.

I agree Blackrock endorsement is fantastic, but let's not get carried away. Someone posted they have 10 trillion in assets under management. Holding a 5% stake in ANIC equates to the square root of diddly squat. Nevertheless, it is usefully symbolic to have institutional backing.

I still remain to be remotely convinced that events in Ukraine do anything for this technology. Why is reliance on a technological solution for your food which is protected by clever IP by a handful of companies especially "secure"?

Perhaps the market is not asleep at the wheel after all and we are just naively optimistic.....Just saying. No need to shout me down.

Gonsan - whilst food security applies to everyone, are you really saying you have no concerns over the authoritarian/unpredictable government risk? We all want to make money from this. If you invest in a state where you have no guarantees from the government that you will be able to retain the fruits of your labour, then that introduces a separate risk from the technological risk that you knew about when you 1st invested in this. I'm not disputing CellX may be a good company and that you can ignore China, but it's hard for me to be as unequivocally pleased as you seem to be. Why not invest in the CellX of Russia/Iran/Afghanistan/pick A.N.Other unpleasant regime? They all need to think about food security too, but there are lots of good reasons to be worried as a Westerner about investing in these countries. When Mellon talks about food security, for me the underlying pretext is that it is the food security of "friendly" nations everyone is talking about.

CellX may be a fantastic company, but does anyone on here share a concern that whilst you want to be invested in this novel startup industry, you do not necessarily want to also take on emerging market risk and unpredictable/authoritarian government risk? In China, if you get too big for your boots you get your wings clipped (Jack Ma being high profile case in point but look at the tech industry in general in China over the past 6-12 months). This is a shame, because China is clearly an enormous market but Jim Mellon and other are bigging up the food security argument post Ukraine debacle and I don't think investing in Chinese companies tick that box.

And for some more context, see comparison to a conventional chicken producer:

https://cranswick.plc.uk/our-story/our-sites/eye

So to increase chicken output from 500k birds per week to 1.4m birds per week cost them £78m. Cultured meat costs still need slashed!!!

Latest news from Upside Foods (whom Anic are not currently invested in):

https://upsidefoods.com/upside-series-c-fundraising-round/

Key takeaway is that the new facility will be capable of making 10's of millions of pounds of meat per year. That's a bit more like it but still a bit to go bearing in mind a decent sized conventional chicken processing facility in the UK can churn out approaching 1 million chickens per week. Still, it's massively bigger than their recently opened facility. $400million is a lot of money to get to this point though so I wonder how much it would cost for a facility which could match the output of a conventional processing plant. On balance, good news though.