A smiling chef called Daniel, sporting glasses, unruly beard and a baseball cap, pinched a yellowish piece of meat that looked like a fleshy doorstop between his thumb and index finger. He dropped it into a pan, where it sizzled and issued the familiar aroma: chicken.
Uma Valeti, a cardiologist-cum-entrepreneur, recorded me on his iPhone as I watched the piece of flesh brown before me. “You’re one of about 1,000 people who have had this experience,” he said.
I was about to eat a piece of “cultured” chicken created by Upside Foods, his six-year-old start-up based in Emeryville, California, across the bay from San Francisco. This chicken had never clucked. It had no beak nor feathers. It was never, in fact, a bird. Two weeks prior, my chicken was a primordial soup of cells, amino acids, fats, vitamins and growth factors. This solution, with the consistency of chunky soup, was dropped into what looks like a brewer’s stainless steel vat to ferment. The cells doubled and doubled and doubled until they bumped into each other and connected, forming fibres of flesh that were then harvested for my delectation.
Welcome to the future of meat: animals without the slaughter. Meat for everyone, with none of the planet-killing side effects of the global agro-industrial complex.
That is what Valeti and his many competitors are promising, and the pitch has worked. Nearly 100 start-ups across Europe, America and Asia have hatched to develop cultivated or cultured fish, duck, beef, pork, chicken, tuna and virtually any other animal you can think of. Since 2020, venture capitalists have poured in more than $1 billion (£740 million) in over 50 start-up financing rounds, according to data from Pitchbook. Upside has raised more than $200 million from investors including Sir Richard Branson and Bill Gates, chicken giant Tyson Foods and Japan’s SoftBank.
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The rush is founded on a core breakthrough: after years of laboratory tinkering, the industry has cracked the fermenting of animal flesh. But now it faces a bigger test — turning these science experiments into global businesses.
Sceptics abound. They predict that the orgy of spending will end in tears and that cultured meat will, at best, become a pricey, luxury item — guilt-free protein for the 1 per cent. Indeed, a techno-economic analysis commissioned by the Good Food Institute (GFI), the industry trade body, admitted this year that cultured meat costs anywhere from 100 to 10,000 times the price of traditional meat.
Yet it also predicted that those prices will plummet from $22,000 per kilo to just $5.66 by 2030 as the industry scales.
Such a reduction would require a parade of astounding advances that, depending on which side you sit, will either be heroic or hopelessly impossible.
Jim Mellon is a true believer. The billionaire Scottish investor has predicted that cultivated meat will be “bigger than electric cars”. His London-listed company, Agronomics, is one of the world’s most prolific investors in the sector.
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The stakes are high. Industrial agriculture accounts for a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions. A third of arable land is devoted to crops we feed to animals that we then slaughter. Remaking the global food system has been a top agenda item at the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.
The industry has leant heavily into its potential starring role in this battle. Eat Just, a San Francisco start-up, announced this summer it would build a production facility in Doha after the Qatar Investment Authority led a $200 million investment in its plan to make meat “without tearing down a forest or taking a life”.
In an oft-quoted 2019 study, think tank Rethinkx predicted that by 2030 demand for cow products will have fallen by 70 per cent, the industry will in effect be bankrupt and that “other livestock markets such as chicken, pig and fish will follow a similar trajectory”. It added: “We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption of agriculture in history.”
Not everyone, though, thinks this brave new world awaits. David Humbird admitted he has become known as “the no guy”. Humbird, who has a PhD in chemical engineering, was commissioned by Open Philanthropy — the NGO funded by Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz — to assess the potential of cultured meat. He spent two years on a 100-page report that he published in December 2020. His conclusion: even assuming vast strides in the production process, the best the industry can hope to produce is mince meat at premium cut prices — or about $50 per kg.
“There’s no doubt you can culture animal cells and turn them into something that has calories, but there’s nothing about that science that is consistent with the economics of food,” he said. “There’s just a leap of logic to get there.”
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That reality will soon dawn on the countless investors who have rushed in, Humbird predicted, and the flow of cash into the sector will dry up. He added: “It might work as a luxury food like caviar, but it’s not going to really move the needle in terms of how many animals are slaughtered, or the footprint of agriculture.”
My chicken began life three and a half years ago when Upside took a biopsy from an embryo. From that sample, it extracted stem cells, which grow into “seed trains” that act like the starter for a sourdough loaf. A batch of these cells were then dropped into the broth of nutrients, which propagated over weeks until harvesting. This is, broadly, how all meat cultivation works.
Scaling it up requires walking a tightrope that will test the limits of biology and industrial process. From where Humbird sits, it is a virtual impossibility. He highlighted three hurdles. One is the need for high-grade amino acids free of impurities that might otherwise corrupt the fermentation process and kill the cells. He reckons these alone will cost $8 per pound of cultured meat — already more than a pound of typical mince. Then there is the requirement, in Humbird’s estimation, for clean rooms and extreme sterility measures — because the slightest bit of bacteria can ruin an entire batch. Clean rooms are extremely expensive to operate and, importantly, there are limits to how big they can get without sacrificing functionality. The same goes for bioreactors — the steel vats in which this new wave of meat will be brewed. Smaller clean rooms and smaller reactors mean smaller plants, which directly undermines the scale that the industry needs to produce cheaply.
And the third hurdle is the limits of metabolism — the speed and proficiency of the cellular doubling at the heart of the process. The industry will need to get much, much more efficient at pumping out meat to bring costs down. This may be possible through cellular engineering, but faster-growing cells produce more waste, which creates a host of new issues that may, or may not, be solvable.
Industry insiders agree with Humbird that the scale-up challenge is immense, and that the path to get to true cost parity with traditional meat is not straightforward. They are just more confident that they can pull it off. Elliot Swartz, GFI’s senior scientist, said: “As we’ve seen with smartphones, solar panels and genome sequencing, many impactful technologies that now shape our lives were unimaginable before key scientific breakthroughs made them possible. Cultivated meat companies and scientists have already successfully challenged many historical assumptions about animal cell culture and we have far from exhausted the creativity of researchers in this field.”
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Upside said its goal is to sell its product for less than traditional meat. It said: “Since we were founded, we’ve brought costs down by multiple orders of magnitude, and we see a clear path to bringing affordable products to consumers.” For investors, it is a leap of faith.
So how was the chicken? Daniel prepared two bites. One was “naked”: just the meat, with a bit of salt and pepper. The other was “composed”: the bird was served with a garlic and white wine butter sauce — akin to something you might find in a restaurant.
I bit down on the unadorned meat and, well, it tasted like chicken. It was fibrous, like an actual bird. It broke into strands, had a bounce to the bite, tasted a bit bland — it was breast meat after all. For want of a better word, very chicken-y.
As a feat of food engineering, it was impressive, especially as I looked around at where it had come from — a facility that could be mistaken for a brewery, all polished concrete floors and shiny tanks.
Valeti opened it to the public last week. The day before my visit, he welcomed the first school field trip, with kids as young as five peering through its production floor windows to see that meat can come from a factory, not a cow.
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Valeti’s goal is to turn the plant into a public education space — a protein amusement park, if you will. He said: “The big launches that show the promise to the world will happen from here.”
