In late June, Upside and Good Meat got the official thumbs-up from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultured chicken products. (Singapore was the first country to approve cell-based meat back in 2020. NYT) Cultured meat is also known as "cell-based, "cultivated", "clean,", "slaughter-free", "in-vitro", "lab-grown", and "nano-pastured" meat. The regulatory approval puts both companies one step away from starting commercial production of their lab-grown chicken.

This is fantastic news for the cultivated meat industry and for the environment, given that livestock agriculture generates nearly 15% of total greenhouse gas emissions and uses nearly 70% of agricultural land. As practiced today, livestock agriculture is a major contributor to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and water pollution.

The U.S. cultivates more than 9 billion chickens per year which produce some 360 million tons of greenhouse gases. Chicken “farming” also causes air pollution by sending nitrous oxide and ammonia into the atmosphere, and water pollution in the form of nitrogen runoff into waterways.

It’s been a long road for Upside and Good Meat, both founded in 2015. If you were to scroll through their social media accounts after the announcement, you’d see as many positive comments and negative comments (but the negatives are so much more fun):

“The USDA is bought and paid for! Trust nothing they say. This is not 'Agri’ anything! They have lost complete credibility!”
“If ya'll want to eat Petri Dish Food, have at it!!! I'll be eating something that once lived and was put here by God to be food.”
“What fool believes it to somehow be a good idea to ingest these tumors labeled as meat?”
“No thank you! I’m sticking with real, natural-raised beef! #carnivore”
“Fake food for fake humans.”
“Frankenmeat! Never!”

The cultivated meat/no-kill meat industry has many challenges. It’s a young industry. The technology is new. The media necessary to grow animal cells is expensive. Scaling is a challenge. There are contamination risks. Lobbyists from the meat industry have fought against lab-grown meat being labeled “meat.” Reaching price parity with “killed” meat has been called impossible. And funding has been a challenge.

But then there’s consumer acceptance. And if you were to focus solely on the trolls, you’d think the world is ending. What is being written by the trolls is one reason to question everything.

We’re at the beginning of this.

The Cow, Chicken, and Pig Are Being Disrupted

I’ve been paying attention to the cultivated meat industry since Professor Mark Post cooked the first cell-cultured hamburger in August 2013. A year later, I saw Andras Forgacs introduce his meat chips at the first Biofabricate conference in New York City.

As the son of a meat cutter, I’d grown up around the beef industry. I visited the various meatpacking plants where my father worked, and as a teenager, worked summers as a meat peddler with an uncle visiting the giant stockyards and meat packing facilities in Vernon, California. I’d seen and heard from my father how the meat industry changed and consolidated. Today, just four firms — Cargill, JBS, National Beef Packing, and Tyson Foods — control 55% to 85% of the hog, cattle, and chicken markets.

(For an excellent analysis of meat industry consolidation, read Matt Stoller’s piece, Economists to Cattle Ranchers: Stop Being So Emotional About the Monopolies Devouring Your Family Businesses).

In addition, the amount of water necessary to produce one kilogram of beef - 15,000 liters - is astounding.

Of course, I was going to pay attention to cultivated meat: it is adjacent to biotech. And the precision fermentation of proteins means the cow – one of the oldest, largest, and most efficient protein production systems in the world - is being disrupted.

In 2019, Tony Seba’s think tank, RethinkX, wrote a report titled: Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030. According to the report:

“We are undergoing a protein disruption by economics. The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute - more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety….
“That means that, by 2030, modern food products will be of higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace...
“Production volumes of the US beef and dairy industries and their suppliers will decline by more than 50% by 2030, and by nearly 90% by 2035. By 2030, the market by volume for ground beef will have shrunk by 70%, the steak market by 30%, and the dairy market by almost 90%. Crop farming volumes, such as soy, corn, and alfalfa will fall by more than 50%.”

Those numbers have to be scary to anyone in traditional livestock agriculture.

We’re entering a new world.

While the trolls bemoan the clearance for marketing of Upside and Good Meat’s cultivated meat, consumers are speaking with their wallets.

On the same day that the USDA cleared Upside and Good Meat’s chicken products, they reported that individuals in the US are drinking less milk.

Earlier in the year, data compiled by the nonprofit Good Food Institute, Plant-Based Food Association, and the market insights firm SPINS, reported that dairy-free milk continues to gain market share over its animal-derived counterparts. Over the past three years, sales of dairy-free milk have grown 36% at a compounded annual growth rate of 11%.

In other words, instead of milk from cows, consumers are buying non-dairy alternatives (which, according to the FDA, can be called milk).

Again, if you were just reading the trolls, you’d think “Frankenmeat” is going to destroy humanity. If you were only paying attention to the trolls, you’d be missing the bigger picture.

Despite the challenges faced by the alternate protein and cultivated meat industries, this is positive change.

Personally, I see multiple opportunities for better life science (company) storytelling.

If you’d like to learn more, you can listen to cultivated premium beef company, Orbillion, talks about their company in this episode of the Grow Everything podcast.

Learning to Love GMOs

Two years ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover feature titled Learning to Love G.M.O.s. It featured a beautiful picture of an indigo tomato (which I’ll get into in a minute). According to the article:

“Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, G.M.O.s have remained wildly unpopular with consumers (emphasis mine), who see them as dubious tools of Big Ag, with potentially sinister impacts on both people and the environment… At the same time, resistance to G.M.O. foods has only become more entrenched. The market for products certified to be non-G.M.O. has increased more than 70-fold since 2010, from roughly $350 million that year to $26 billion by 2018. There are now more than 55,000 products carrying the “Non-G.M.O. Project Verified” label on their packaging. Nearly half of all U.S. shoppers say that they try not to buy G.M.O. foods, while a study by Jennifer Kuzma, a biochemist who is a director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, found that consumers will pay up to 20% more to avoid them.”

Read that again: Consumers will pay up to 20% more to avoid GMOs.

Consumers Love GMOs When They Understand the Benefits

In recent episode of the Grow Everything podcast, we interviewed Nathan Pumplin, the CEO of Norfolk Healthy Produce, the company behind the purple tomato (which BTW is delicious and also just received USDA/FDA clearance for marketing).During our conversation, Pumplin pointed out that there is a high level of awareness of GMOs because they are ever-present. For example, the label of every bag of Doritos reads: Made With Genetically Engineered Organisms.

Consumers know the term GMO. They might not understand what genetically modified organisms are. And if they do, they might think of them as evil.

The way that entrepreneurs start and build companies today, in the 2020s, is very different compared to 40 years ago. Entrepreneurs today are taught to solve a problem, talk to customers, and find product-market fit before they create their product.

Nathan pointed out that the marketing and interest for the purple tomato actually started in 2008 when an article in the Guardian described their product, and, not surprisingly, created controversy and drove interest.

“If it bleeds, it leads,”

Nathan joked. Which, if you aren’t familiar, is a term coined by television journalists that suggests that violence, conflict, or death gets top billing because it gets attention (or clicks).

Headlines that announce “blood and violence” work because they play directly into the way our brains are hardwired to focus on the negative. Our primitive ancestors had to be able to register threats to avoid danger and increase survival rates.

Social media has been successful because of its ability to keep us focused on the negative, the outrageous, and the polarizing. Social media takes advantage of “catastrophizing,” a cognitive bias that leads us to believe that situations are much worse than they are. That’s why it might seem like things are overwhelmingly negative all the time.

Nathan goes on to point out that when Norfolk started going through the regulatory process in 2019, there was increasing interest in GMOs because consumers - particularly early adopters - showed an interest in learning more about the pros and cons of genetic modification and the benefits of biotechnology. They wanted to learn what biotech can do to solve some of society’s most pressing problems.

According to Nathan,

“When you talk to people who think GMOs are bad and you show them the purple tomato, explaining that it uses technology to insert an edible flower gene to turn on a natural pathway and that it has nutrients that are in blueberries, acai berries, and blackberries, people say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think GMOs did that. I thought GMOs were injected with pesticides. And cause cancer?’ But I can say ‘No, our product isn’t any of those things.’ And almost universally, people say, ‘OK. Yours is a GMO I can get behind. This is something I really want, something I can’t wait to have.”

Consumer acceptance matters.

Cultivated Meat is Not a Genetically Modified Organism

Generally, cultivated meat, lab-grown meat, or cell-cultured meat is produced by taking animal cells and growing them in a bioreactor filled with nutrient-rich media (that is, media that contains amino acids, vitamins, and minerals) to feed those cells. The cells grow into muscle, fat, and other tissues that make up meat.

*The Epic of In Vitro Meat Production—A Fiction into Reality*
(**Balasubramanian B. et. al.**)

No animals are harmed in the production of cultured meat.

The cells that are used are often sourced from cell banks of livestock (like chickens, cows, pigs, salmon, tuna, etc.).

The cells from those cell banks come directly from donor animals. They are not genetically modified – they don’t need to be – cells will multiply naturally without their DNA being altered via genetic engineering.

Some startups have explored genetic modification to improve the nutrient profiles of cultivated meat or to increase growth rates, but they are the exception. Some startups use gene editing techniques like CRISPR to select or tweak certain genes to optimize cells for growth.

In 2017, a study of consumer perception of cultivated meat found an overall positive view with 65.3% of participants claiming they would be willing to try cultured meat, of whom 32.6% would be willing to eat it regularly, 47.7% would be more willing to eat it compared to soy-based meat substitutes, and 31.5% would be willing to eat it. (Science Direct)

In 2023, Mosa Meats, the Netherlands’ largest producer of cultivated meat, conducted a study of 193 people in the Netherlands. The study found if people are properly informed and the benefits are clear they will choose to try cultured meat. Moreover, some are willing to pay nearly 40% more for it than regular meat. [source: PLOS ONE]

Read that again:

Some consumers are willing to pay nearly 40% more for cultured meat than regular meat.

(Mosa Meats can’t sell their product in the Netherlands because the EU has very strict laws against both genetic engineering and cultured meat, though it varies from country to country: Italians want to ban it outright, while Spain was the first country to approve the sale of cultivated meat and the Spanish government hopes to take a leading role in European cultivated meat innovation and commercialization.)

If you want to hear Nathan’s perspectives on GMOs and commercializing that purple tomato, check out our Grow Everything interview here.

Where’s the Money?

According to the Good Food Institute, all-time investments into companies developing cultivated meat, fermentation-derived proteins, and other cell-cultured products reached $2.8 billion in 2022. Cultivated meat companies closed 77 deals in 2022, bringing the total of deals to 294. In addition, the cultivated meat industry saw 12 growth-stage (Series B or higher) deals, the largest being Upside Foods’ $400 million Series C in 2022. (Good Food Institute).

GFI also reports that the number of unique investors grew by 19% in 2022, reaching a total of 679 since 2016.

In a separate interview, the co-founders of Orbillion, Chief Scientific Founder, Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay, Ph.D., and Chief Operations Officer, Samet Yildirim, explained that we are in the third generation of cultivated meat startups. (Remember how I said this is a young industry.)

At Messaginglab we’ve been asking what potential investors should be asking. Among those questions are:

Where did your cell line come from?
What is the growth rate of the cells you’re turning into meat?
Are those cells metabolically efficient?
What kind of bioreactor are you using? What kind of cell density will you achieve? How will you scale that?
How will you prevent microbial contamination during the production process?
What kind of growth media are you using? What kinds of growth factors? Where do they come from?
Who is your customer? Have you tested your product with them?

If you’d like to know more about cultivated meat and our work here at Messaginglab, subscribe to our newsletter below.

Cultivated Meat is Good to Go: Brace Yourself