Cultured Meat as the Ethical Shift in Culture?
From cultured meat to cultured everything. Our CEO Evelyne Pflugi — who is also a Food Science Engineer — brings the next big evolution to the table: synthetic biology.
While plant-based protein has become a much hyped topic, we argue that cultured and fermented products are probably the healthier and more sustainable source of protein in the long run. The technologies coming together to enable this shift reach further than meat and have the potential to disrupt anything animal- and plant- based that humans consume or use. From shrimp to chocolate, from fur to leather, for potentially anything we ever made: Let’s talk about synthetic biology.
“In due time, we will escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing.” Winston Churchill’s vision from 1931 is close to reality. Earlier this year, an Israeli startup, Future Meat, said it had lowered the production cost of a quarter-pound chicken breast to just $7.50. It hopes to sell chicken fingers in the U.S. next year. Costs aside, one hurdle to take could be consumers’ acceptance. Interestingly, there seems to be more controversy around cultured meat than around the reality of how actual animal meat is being “produced”. To venture a prognosis for e.g. possible adoption rates, it’s always helpful to look at similar historic cases for reference.
The cultured chicken nugget of the last decade
The cultured chicken wing equivalent of the 90s and 2000s is insulin. Until far into the 1980s, insulin was harvested from mashed up pancreas of cows and pigs. There was simply no alternative way to produce this life-saving ingredient. It is not just needed for an increasingly overweight society, but also for the increasing ratio of type 1 diabetics — those of us that were born that way. For humans suffering from diabetes, the discovery of external insulin production as a solution was groundbreaking.
For investors and the pharma industry, even more so was the ability to produce this much needed substance at scale. Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Eli Lilly today are leaders in this space. They use bacteria or yeast cells to produce insulin in large bioreactors. This non-animal sourced substance was quickly accepted by society, regulators, and the industry as the new standard: it simply made sense to produce insulin this way. By and large, producing any originally human- and animal- sourced substances this way is undisputed — when it comes to drugs.
We are in the year 2021 now. Americans alone eat roughly 2billion chicken nuggets per year — one might deem it a ‘much needed substance’ at that scale, too. And our contention here is that chicken nuggets — the way they are today — can be replaced with a bioreactor process at much lower cost to the environment and the animals involved. Soon, they can be produced to be much healthier at the same cost, too.
This comment may raise scepticism among industry connoisseurs, but only when missing the words ‘the way they are today’ in the above sentence. Comparing apples with apples — or nuggets with nuggets, we have to take into account that chicken nuggets are not even primarily meat, but mostly fat and assorted viscera — including epithelium, bone, nerve and connective tissue — made palatable through ultra-processing. As Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N Rosenberg put it: “They are a homogenised, bite-size avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labour”.
Below 5% of nugget ‘meat’ is really chicken meat, and rarely is it chicken breast. So while the recent price point is at 7.5 -100$/kg vs current nugget cost below 2$/kg, the chicken meat content in cultured versions is also above 20%, and additional ingredients are of far higher quality. Were it cultured nuggets producers’ goal to match current standards on what we willingly feed our children — they could mix their precious product up with some cellulose and other waste products and get a similarly cheap and likely still nutritionally more valuable product to market. Again, it would be at much lower cost to the environment and to animals (factors not yet used in cost calculations).
Fermentation and cultured products in favor over planted proteins
What’s further unnoticed is that the cellular agriculture industry comes with far better, higher paying, and less dangerous jobs than the meat farming and slaughtering industry does — at least when considering factors such as limbs cut off, viruses and pandemics caused, and overall economic costs.
Having said all this, TSG is about understanding industry value chains and identifying possible disruptions and novel technologies as they happen. We leave this note with a few hints at that and what’s more to come:
- Cultured shrimp and seafood will soon be sold and consumed in Singapore and Hong Kong restaurants. We’re onboarding experts in this field.
- Nestlé, the world’s largest representative of the old and new food industry just made a string of investments in cultured and hybrid meat tech. We’ll get into what we mean with ‘hybrid’ in due time.
- ‘Cellular Agriculture’ is a term well-reflective of how broad this cultured food story goes — beyond animals and over to chocolate! ZHAW in Switzerland is producing chocolate in reactors vs sourcing cocoa beans (often in areas where water resources are just as scarce as human rights).
- Within the food sector, there are also the topics of mycoprotein (fermentation!) and plant-based protein to touch on: With our value chain investing approach and innovation focus, the biomass- as well as precision- fermentation-angle excites us almost as much as cellular agriculture, plant-based protein less so in light of the required land to grow plants and significant amounts of downstream processing. As ever so often, we leave hypes and crowded trades to our peers.
Costs for cultured proteins are on a downward track. In addition, as demand grows for earth’s resources, and climate and pandemics disrupt supply, the mismatch on the supply/demand equation will eventually move current food costs closer to cultured versions. These technologies and processes can and will be used to produce flavors, cremes, fur, wool, and leather, and they will move on to disrupt other industries, too — investors might want to get used to the term ‘Synthetic Biology’.
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