We had a good discussion about this going in the 10 year fad thread so I thought I’d make a new thread dedicated to this topic.

The general idea is growing genuine animal meat in a laboratory setting, starting from stem cells or similar, and “feeding” them a growth media to get them to proliferate into skeletal muscle cells/tissues - ie meat.

I strongly believe this is going to be a world-changing technology over the next decade+ and am co-founding a company focused on this space.

My background is pro poker for 10+ years before transitioning to co-founding a digital marketing company which I sold at the beginning of 2018 right around the time I started getting obsessed with this space. I got my first exposure to the sector by founding an angel investment syndicate focused on investing in the industry and we closed a pre-seed round of one early stage company in October. While in search of my next investment deal I got introduced to my now co-founder who at the time was a solo founder and far too early to be investable, so we decided to become cofounders with him being the technical guy and me handling the business oriented aspects. His background is in running a lab that cultures human stem cells into skeletal muscle tissue for implantation into patients with muscular dystrophy. He is one of the leading scientists in this field and I of course believe is pretty uniquely suited to solving some of the many challenges of turning this emerging technology into a viable wide-scale product.


I’ll quote the posts from the other thread below to get that discussion moved over to this thread but here are a few other potential discussion topics.

1. Impact on animal cruelty - this process eliminates all need to harm animals in order to produce meat. Cells are harvested from a living animal via a harmless biopsy which can them produce vast quantities of meat.

2. Impact on environment - an oxford study found that cellular agriculture could produce meat that requires 95% less land and water resources as well as significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Reports are a little varied on the exact environmental impact of our current farming methods but the most bearish argue that agriculture is just as bad as transportation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions

3. Antibiotics - the UN recently released a report that stated rising use of antibiotics in agriculture is posing one of the greatest emerging global human health risks. Cellular agriculture could drastically reduce if not eliminate the need for antibiotics in our meat production as it is produced in a general sterile environment. This also has potentially interesting implications for its shelf life and refrigeration needs.

4. Health value of meat - producing meat in this manner will allow for us to have full control over the amount and type of fat included in the end products. Ie you could theoretically make a burger with only healthy unsaturated fats etc. It also provides the opportunity to reduce or eliminate food-borne illness from meat.

5. Novel new meat products - by co-culturing different species it will become possible to make things like a “turducken” where the actual muscle fibers are intertwined as opposed to discrete chunks layered together from distinctly different animals.

6. Regulation - this is currently a slight holdup but seems like the USA is taking a pretty progressive stance and I’m confident the regulatory framework will be in place right around the same time the technology is reasonably viable to hit the market. The FDA and USDA put out a statement saying they will be jointly regulating the industry with the FDA handling everything up to the point of “harvest” (of the cells) and the USDA taking things from there.

7. Timeline - a half dozen companies or so have produced very small scale prototypes over via varying levels of sustainable methods. For the most part it is my belief that these prototypes have generally been created in ways that are completely un-scalable to date. I think we are 2-4 years from medium scale commercial availability and 5-10 years away from wide scale adoption. Almost certainly more than 10 years away from actual profitability for the companies in this space.

8. Consumer adoption - it is going to be interesting to see how much push-back there is from this “frankenmeat” from the average meat eating consumer. I am obviously quite bullish that this hurdle will be overcome but there are of course some very wealthy and powerful incumbents in the traditional meat space who have vested interests in turning customers off to this stuff as much as possible. It will also be interesting to see how vegans and vegetarians react to it - but they are of course not the primary target market.

9. Competition - there are currently about two dozen companies working directly in this space in some fashion. None have any commercial products available yet and only one has attempted to announce a timeline for releasing a product (which already came and went). Some of the biggest current players (mostly just in terms of funding) are Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, Aleph Farms, and JUST.

10. Investment - there has been significant venture capital flowing in which is increasing at a rate of approx 100%/year last I checked but in terms of the size of the opportunity the industry is still extremely young and this is reflected in the just ~$100mm in total funding thus far across the top ~dozen companies. Big name investors include Tyson Ventures, Cargill, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Sergay Brin.

11. Other species and products - this tech isn’t limited to producing mammal proteins. Some companies are working on fish, crustaceans, milk, cheese, and even things like leather (which is the one application that actually already has a commercially available product from Modern Meadow).

12. Price and taste - at first these products will be targeted toward health/environment/animal conscious consumers similar to Beyond/Impossible but that is not the long term plan. Given the clearly more efficient production method I believe these products will eventually surpass traditional meat in terms of price and given the ability to so perfectly compose each product at the molecular level I believe they will eventually be taste competitive if not superior to traditional meat as well.

Further reading:

https://cleanmeat.com/the-book/

https://elliot-swartz.squarespace.co...d/cleanmeat301

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...24224417303400

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2_JYNZcgKc

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Looks like you are doing great things Dave. I’ll take a look at the site.

(Alex from USD)

Are you more passionate about changing the world or getting a 50x out the deal?

It's definitely both. I genuinely believe this technology is going to have a massively positive impact on the world and am very excited about being a part of that. But the fact that I also think it has enormous profit potential is of course very motivating as well.

I'm not seeing the path to profit here.

1. Hire human stem cell organ grower specialist (growing at huge expense)
2. Do the same thing with cow cells using an expensive medium to nurture specifically stem cells as they need a special medium with the right signalling
3. ???????
4. ???????
5. Get cost down below offal
6. Profit?

I don't see how you get from 2 to 5. I just can't see a path.

- Find a way of producing the embryonic medium in bulk? Seems like a moonshot
- Find a way of growing it without the medium? Moonshot also.

This is why I love aggressive sarcomas. Once you have one, you don't need the specially harvested medium from live cows. What am I missing? And even with that, this is the current price of artificial media to grow cells.



At $2/pound of meat cost for all production parts to be commercially viable, how do you bridge this gap? It seems massive. You need to get the medium down to <50c/liter for this to work, no?

I'm writing as someone totally ignorant of this space/biology but it seems to me that this is a non-starter and your business is actually about getting the price of the growth medium down as a first step and not much else. Then you have to scale up sterile vats to grow it in.

The beautiful thing about cows is that they turn cheapest-price nutrition (grain or grass) into protein at an incredible ratio.

Given that a major processing step is needed to turn grain or soy into cell-available proteins, sugars, etc (hence the cost of cell growth medium) it might always be substantially more economical to have a cow as the cell-growing incubator as there is no cost to the entire process, whereas you have large costs.

What odds would you give that you're doomed from the start to always be substantially more expensive than nature's cell growing?

edit: Chickens are even more extraordinary with a 1.6 conversion ratio!

And about 3.5 edible after all losses including 20% in cooking. I don't see how you can possibly beat this. Your growth medium can only be 3.5x more expensive than straight harvested second class grain, even assuming ceteris paribus on every other cost. I think that is probably impossible.

Getting the growth media cost down, making it more efficient, recyclable, etc is certainly the biggest and most immediate challenge but we don't think its as insurmountable as you suggest. Media is definitely going to be serum-free. I'm not sure how you are arriving at the 50c/liter number? We are already below the prices you are quoting in that image but not near 50c/liter of course.

Getting cost competitive with conventional meat is the world-changing goal but I think everyone would agree that is a long way off. The intermediary step(s) would be premium products for people who care about health/environment/animals etc.

I'd agree that the space could eventually change the world. I think being thoroughly passionate about it is how you slowly and methodically build something, but having a passion for the 50x is what I want to see out of a startup. Slapping together something that is appealing to a buyout is an art in itself. Passion for the work doesn't necessarily translate

you said 10 years...well you can burn through a lot of money in 10 years. I'd guess its 30-50 but im not really up on this stuff.

I think you can have a "company" in this area, its just that the company may have to rely on grants to fund its existence for a while until its much closer to kicking it over the line.

IF I were to plan to build a company Id do something that is one aspect of producing the end product...because all the companies chasing the end product can use your product or service long before labmeat hits the market...no idea what that is...but perhaps you can think of it

What edges does your company have vs. the 20+ other companies in this space? Better expertise? Different focus?

I think the more important question is, what edges do they have on nature??

Chickens put on 1 lb of weight for 1.6 lbs of grain, the cheapest form of organic energy we can produce. Cell mediums will require further processing precise processing of this cheapest form of organic energy and multiple macro and micro nutrients balanced just right...which means many multiples of the cheapest form of energy. Given that chickens are already about as close as you can get to a perfect 1:1 cheapest energy:weight, it seems to me that it's impossible that grown meat can ever be <4x more expensive than chicken. And this will likely be improved further by genetics.

The whole field is completely ****ed in my view as it goes against basic economics. Most things that go against basic economics with no path to being cheaper are doomed. Perhaps you can carve out a niche growing more expensive meats like fine steaks, but that's in a drop in the ocean compared to the meat industry (which the stated goal is to overhaul) and most connoisseurs of fine steaks will want the real thing, not lab cells.

Don't mean to be a downer, just analyzing this the same way I'd analyze a good opportunity. I can't see a path.

One day humans will be enlightened enough to view animal caging, farming and slaughter as a far more horrific stain on humanity than slavery (given that mammals feel the full range of emotions and most of the sentient senses we feel and their feelings aren't that different from an 80 IQ human), but that is decades away and requires a rather large change in human morality/enlightenment of a larger magnitude than the abolishing of slavery did.

I don't know what you mean by cheapest form of "organic energy." Are you using organic energy to mean simply meat?

And I don't think that 1 lb. grain to 1.6 lb chicken is really accurate. First of all, that's the live weight, so all the feathers, the head, the bones, the feet, the offal, the blood, the body water. It takes energy to create all those worthless parts; so lab-grown meat has a clear edge there. But also, the chicks have to be sourced, and that takes energy. The breeding stock for the broilers have a much different life path than the broilers themselves, and the cost of raising the stock and then maintaining the hatcheries and then shipping the chicks that can then grow at 1.6 lbs for every pound of grain needs to be accounted for. Then the antibiotics, maintaining legally humane facilities, cleaning droppings, dressing the carcasses—all that adds up to much more than just paying fifty cents for a chick and then dumping ten pounds of grain in front of it.

It also takes over a month to grow a broiler. I don't know if lab-grown chicken would have an edge over that, but it's certainly conceivable.

Considering the above, my intuition is that it's possible to get meat cheaper than chicken from a lab. And the chances go way up if your bar is four times as expensive. Also, I'm under the impression most of these labs are growing beef, which is much less efficient naturally than chicken.

So my guess is that in ten years your post will be in the same category as those from people in the '90s saying we'd never find an effective treatment for HIV. But I suppose time will tell.

Macronutrients are needed to create macronutrients, whether it's inside a chook or a lab. The cheapest macronutrients we can produce are low grade grains, harvested, untouched, served up as feed. Thus you CANNOT get cheaper incoming feed than what you feed chooks, and cell growth medium is always going to be many many times more expensive than pure harvested grain is. Probably >5x more in the absolute theoretical best case.

They're not worthless parts and all have value. As far as the end-user edible portion goes, I covered this above...the grain -> edible consumer meat ratio is 3:1. Which is just incredible.

So let's look at how big a cost component feed is:



Turns out that it's most of the cost. And lab grown meat will have substantial costs likely larger than the broiler chicken ecosystem. Ergo, lab grown is a massive economic loser and that can never be any different.

Actually it doesn't. Feed is biggest cost by far. We know the number. See above

Time is irrelevant when it's parallelizable and trivially scalable. Only total end product cost matters.

But yes, this is why stem cells are stupid and they're much better searching hundreds of biopsies for a high quality sarcoma. Cucks gonna cuck though - a guy who knows stem cells is gonna stem cell.
Your intuition is completely wrong.
Beef is certain less efficient than chicken. Still, I way lowballed it. Feed processing adds large expenses, as does vats to grow it in (can't have bacteria because no immune system), heating, quality control, etc. Look at what you get FOR FREE in an animal

- Endless source of stem cells
- Highly efficient, free, cell growth medium conversion system from the cheapest or even free feedstocks like grass into a perfect cell growth medium
- Growth regulators and stimulator and a highly sophisticated, billion-year-tested monitoring system
- Stem cell nutrient liquid for growth perfectly expressed for each age
- Vats (wombs, skin) to grow the cells in
- Highly sophisticated waste product excretion system (how the **** is that going to work in a vat on a large scale without either wasting lots of growth medium, or something difficult and expensive like dialysis??)
- Natural heating system keeping it all at optimal cell growth temperature
- Antibacterial system, both active and passive
- Expensive nutrient recycling
- All at incredible energy efficiencies with very low macro and micronutrient waste

That's not at all comparable, and you haven't thought this through. I'm going to down to base macronutrient conversion rates and base macronutrient production cost. That's not even in the same galaxy as finding ways to stop a virus.

Can you push back on the following:

I just had a few conversations with a"whole foods"/vegan blogger friend who is very active in that sub-community.

They convinced me that the vast majority of people they knew would never touch lab grown meat because they believe human attempts are inferior/riskier than the natural state of the world. This person thought lab grown meat still would succeed but actually from the average joes who jump into it. (Of course you can disagree with this premise, but it doesn't change the fact that they believe it strongly.)

I personally don't think the average joe thinks too deeply about where their food comes from or how healthy it is. There is an obesity problem in America for a reason, and McDonalds Market Cap is 150B for a reason. Therefore, I don't see how this is really going to catch on in a serious way now, who are the rapidly growing early adapters?

Pivoting to just be one aspect of the supply chain is likely the end goal. Right now the industry is so young and all the players do things so uniquely that this isn't really possible but it should become possible as the industry matures a bit.

We believe we (really just my partner) have better expertise as he's developed a method for growing skeletal muscle that he is confident is a good bit ahead of the competition in terms of efficiency but it's tough to say for sure as all these companies are very private.

The lab grown meat conferences definitely have a disproportionate number of vegans. Some who want to see it succeed so they can eat it themselves and some who want to see it succeed to save the animals from the rest of us carnivores.

I think the early adopters will be mostly people like me who are happy to pay a premium for a healthier and more ethically sourced product.

TS -

I unfortunately don't have a great answer to your questions around cost other than to say that the cost of the first lab grown burger in 2013 was $330k and I've seen estimates as low as $11.36/burger as of 2017. You don't have to go too much further along that trajectory to get competitive with conventional beef.

You make a compelling case. I actually didn't see your prior post for some reason where you were more explicit saying 3.5x grain yields 1x edible meat. Still, I'm not sure what my bet would be to the line of 'in the year 2100, will most meat consumed by humans be cell-cultured?'

To appeal to authority, since either of us are experts in this area, doesn't it give you a bit of pause that it looks like some very smart people are jostling in this space and banking on it being viable? Your point about the growth medium being too costly is a basic concern that I'm sure they've all considered, yet they persist. I could envision some solution where instead of growing grain, they have big greenhouses growing algae or something that's even cheaper, spray it with micronutrients and dump it into vats with the meat cells and in a month they pull out fifty tons of chicken.

That one Dutch guy whose company's burger was 250k in 2015 now says the marginal cost is 8. That's exponential. And you know what Elon says about EXPONENTIALS.

That's an interesting question. What's the line on "humans will not be consuming food at all" in 2100? I'd have to guess high. Food is toxic, dangerous, unreliable, easily poisoned, imprecise.

Assuming the following: advanced more moral society, not posthuman, still alive, I'd have to go with >80%. But only because the economics won't matter. Similar to how the economics of eating meat daily or turning trees into paper for use in person hygiene doesn't matter any more today compared to the past.
"Experts" are notoriously stupid and hopeful. Most of incredible geniuses in early computer science thought they'd birth AI in the 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s/00s (pick your decade 1-2 decades out), despite transistor counts being nowhere near sufficient in those years (comically 10 orders of magnitude short!!). EVs are another great example - endless hope for over 100 years and only now is the cost per unit starting to work and compare with the well established existing solutions of the incredibly primitive act of setting **** on fire. Or look at cold fusion "experts", which include well credentialed physicists. I think that P(100+ people with credentials would try despite being obviously theoretically hopeless) > 99%. Add in the ability to get funding and it's >99.9%. Plug that into your odds calculator and this appeal to authority is worth nothing in my view.
Are you sure they've considered it? Experts rarely consider what they need to consider. Hope plays a big part, which is not irrational. But it's not like a dude whose business is growing stem cells, going into a startup, is going to have any freaking clue what the theoretical cost limits of medium are. Which means my guess is as good as his.

That is standard for all of these fields by the way. Especially in today's easy money environment where copious venture capital is begging for places to stick their cash.
Perhaps. Grain is dirt cheap for a reason and despite intensive research nothing has been found to compete. It's hard to compete with:
1. Quickly till vast areas of farmland.
2. Drop seeds
3. Do nothing for 3 months except maybe some mass cheap spraying
3. Collect macronutrients at the rate of 100,000 kg per hour.

Can you really imagine an industrial process or algae in a specially prepared vat competing with this for efficiency?? It just can't, no matter how clever we get. This is the core of the problem.

Take the time element out if that makes it easier to visualize, because time is irrelevant. Imagine this all happens in a day:
1. Run a tractor over 100 hectares, tilling the ground, dropping seeds behind in the same process
2. Another tractor immediately runs behind collecting 1600 kg per minute of near pure macronutrient/micronutrient mix to grow broilers at 1.6:1.

How does any other process compete with that on cost? This is close to as simple, lowest infrastructure, lowest labor as a process can get. There just isn't much room to improve efficiency. What's more, animal feed can be seen as a waste product of producing human feed - the damaged, lower quality, not up to spec, etc. This subsidy further lowers cost.
It's asymptotic actually, which is close to the opposite of exponential. Battery cells took 100+ years to get to cost efficiency comparable with nature-theoretical (gasoline). Nature is good at what it does.

The table shows costs to produce chickens in the broiler but, from my understanding, that's only one component of the cost. Companies like Tyson, Pilgrims, etc. don't own the chicken houses -- they sub-contract out that portion of the process.

I'm not saying you're wrong about feed being the highest cost, but I know there's a large amount of transportation cost involved with dropping the chicks off, then picking them back up weeks later ... not to mention processing costs which weren't listed either.

Has anyone seen Dominion on Youtube (for some reason can't embed a link).

wooooeee. gnarly

https://www.atkearney.com/retail/art...-food-industry

I made it about 5 minutes in before I questioned if I really wanted to watch. The answer was no.

I'll never stop eating meat, but yeah, it's ****ed up

Not that farming isn't a mature industry that's relatively efficient, but you've way over simplified the grain industry.

1) Till vast areas of farm land - burning tons of fossile fuels. It takes about 3 gallons of diesel to plow an area the size of a football field.
1b) Test your soil for nutrient levels and fertilize the hell out of it, burning more fossile fuels.
2) Buy expensive genetically modified seeds for optimal production.
3) Spraing; more man hours and more fuel
4) Collect vast micro nutrients, again at high fuel costs.
4b) Dry grain by burning fuel to ensure it doesn't spoil.
4c) Store grain. Most grain is harvested in the fall, but livestock is hungry year round.
4d) Transport grain to its point of use.

Taking the time element out is nice, but there's also a finite amount of till-able land that can produce crops at competitive costs.

None of that really matters, though. We know the cost to feed livestock at today's grain prices. I don't think anyone has a good answer to how much lab meat will cost to grow. I don't think that answer is intuitively guaranteed to be higher than current farming costs.