Macromegas #45 - 5 Critical Challenges that Make Artificial Meat VERY Unlikely to Happen at Scale in the Next Decades
5 Critical Challenges that Make Artificial Meat VERY Unlikely to Happen at Scale in the Next Decades
Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
A few months ago, I shared a very positive outlook on the artificial/cultivated meat industry.
However, I recently read a very thorough technical analysis which made me change my mind on the subject.
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This was the very visual McKinsey study (15min) that I initially took at face-value:
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Now for the fascinating deep-dive into the economics & technological feasibility of artificial meat at scale.
The full essay is 40min-long, but I summarized it into a 16min-read for you below - most likely the only thing you’ll have to read on the industry, until the next major breakthrough - if any.
(You’ll notice that the $4 cost-basis on which the McK study is based is being challenged as overly optimistic, to say the very least.)
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
The Problem
Rather than raise entire animals, we might only grow the parts we eat. Why spend energy growing the complex, sentient structures we call cattle—complete with bones, horns, hooves, and vital organs—when we only want the finished steak? Cultivating meat inside bioreactors eliminates those inconveniences, doing away with the troublesome task of growing a body, of sustaining a consciousness.
Gram for gram, animals are a wildly inefficient vehicle for producing edible protein (as advocates for cultured meat like to point out).
Cattle consume roughly 25 calories of plant material for every calorie of edible protein they produce, according to some estimates.
Even chickens, the most efficient form of livestock from a feed perspective, eat 9 to 10 calories of food for every calorie of edible protein produced.
Friedrich, the director of GFI, has said that’s like throwing away 8 plates of pasta for every one plate we eat.
He’s right—though it’s not only wasteful. Our over-consumption of meat is inherently linked to the global over-production of grains, one of the primary drivers of deforestation and biodiversity loss worldwide.
Next time you’re wondering why Brazilian farmers are burning down the rainforest to plant more soy, think of the world’s 1 billion cattle, each one eating many times its weight in grass, legumes, and grain over the course of its short life.
In contrast, the disembodied economics of cultivated meat could allow for huge production advantages, at least theoretically.
According to the Open Philanthropy report, a mature, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only three to four calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25.
That would still make cultured meat much more inefficient compared to just eating plants themselves; we’d dump two plates of pasta for every one we eat.
Controversy
In March #2021, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.
David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
“And it’s a fractal no. You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
This would explain why cultivated meat companies have repeatedly missed product launch deadlines.
The Imagined Manufacturing Infrastructure
GFI’s imagined manufacturing facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny.
According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot.
For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates).
And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers.
It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year.
JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse.
With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering.
According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.)
The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
The Imagined Manufacturing Process
The manufacturing process, according to GFI, would begin with a 1.5-milliliter vial of production-optimized animal cells (the report doesn’t specify which livestock species).
Those cells would be used to inoculate a 250-ml flask, a vessel smaller than a can of soda.
The rest of the flask would be filled with a specially formulated growth medium, a nutrient-dense broth of purified water, salts, glucose, amino acids, and “growth factors”—the hormones, recombinant proteins, cytokines and other substances that regulate cell development and metabolism.
In a sense, the role of this liquid is to approximate good old-fashioned blood, the fluid that delivers nutrients and hormones to cells inside a living animal’s body.
Slowly, the initial seed cells would begin to multiply.
After 10 days, according to GFI, the cells graduate to their first bioreactor, a small, 50-liter model.
In another 10 days, they would move to a much larger, 12,500-liter stirred batch reactor, the kind of steel vessel you might expect to see in a brewery, capable of holding the same volume as a backyard swimming pool.
This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing.
Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension.
Because of this characteristic, more fluid is pumped into the reactor as cells multiply, maintaining a specific ratio of fluid to cells.
Any cultured meat facility, real or imagined, will likely need to operate this way: with a graduated series of ever-larger reactors, like a sequence of Russian dolls.
The 5 Key Challenges
1st Challenge - Profitability
If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
Humbird worked off the assumption that the industry would grow to produce 100 kilotons per year worldwide—roughly the amount of plant-based “meat” produced in 2020.
He found that even given those economies of scale, which would lower input and material costs to prices that don’t exist today, a facility producing roughly 6.8 kilotons of cultured meat per year would fail to create a cost-competitive product.
Using large, 20,000 L reactors would result in a production cost of about $17 per pound of meat, according to the analysis.
Relying on smaller, more medium-efficient perfusion reactors would be even pricier, resulting in a final cost of over $23 per pound.
And if $17 per pound doesn’t sound too high, consider this:
The final product would be a single-cell slurry, a mix of 30 percent animal cells and 70 percent water, suitable only for ground-meat-style products like burgers and nuggets.
With markups being what they are, a $17 pound of ground cultivated meat at the factory quickly becomes $40 at the grocery store—or a $100 quarter-pounder at a restaurant. Anything resembling a steak would require additional production processes, introduce new engineering challenges, and ultimately contribute additional expense.
By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts.
Despite that forbidding premise, GFI’s TEA doggedly shows a path forward, dropping the cost of producing a kilogram of cultured meat from a current-day high estimate of over $22,000 to a goal of $5.66 by 2030.
2nd Challenge - Hygiene
Cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists.
For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room.
To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building.
The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount.
Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said.
“Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem.
Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said.
“Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line.
The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
We’re saying, guys, it has to be pharmaceutical-grade because the process is going to demand it,” Wood told me.
“It’s not whether someone will allow you to run at food-grade specs. It’s just the fact you can’t physically do it.”
But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap.
Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars.
That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities:
They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors.
Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors.
The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
"You can make a big plant, or you can make a clean plant,” he told me.
“So if you want to feed millions and millions of people, it’s got to be big.
But if you want to do it with animal cells, it’s got to be clean.
We need both, and you can’t do that.”
3rd Challenge - Ethics
What is FBS?
When cattle are processed at a slaughterhouse, workers will sometimes cut open a cow’s body and discover a fetus.
A technician will be called in who can perform euthanasia and, from there, extract the fetus’s blood.
The resulting substance, known as fetal bovine serum (FBS), amounts to a final gift for humanity.
FBS would be a perfect ingredient to include in cultured meat growth media, because it contains key proteins and vitamins that cells need to maintain health and stability.
In fact, it can be hard to make cells grow properly without FBS. “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS),” according to a 2013 article in the peer-reviewed journal BioMed Research International.
For cultivated meat, though, FBS is anathema.
Cultured animal protein can’t really be “meat without slaughter” if it’s dependent on an ingredient that’s intertwined with the current, grim realities of commodity beef production. So cultured meat startups also face the challenge of growing their cells in FBS-free media—though that’s not going to be easy.
In order to be viable, cultured meat companies will need to find ways to produce large amounts of product without FBS.
For now, though, serum-free media can be both hugely expensive and challenging to develop; in CE Delft’s estimation, its use can ratchet up the cost of cultured meat to well over $20,000 per kilogram.
"They say, oh, but these costs are just going to go away in five years or 10 years. And there’s no explanation as to how or why.”
4th Challenge - Amino
There’s another issue: In focusing on micronutrients as the primary cost driver, GFI may have underestimated the cost and complexity of providing macronutrients at scale.
Just like other living animals, cultured cells will need amino acids to thrive.
In Humbird’s projection, the cost of aminos alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef.
GFI’s study, on the other hand, reports that the cost of aminos may eventually be as low as 40 cents per kilo.
Why the discrepancy?
A footnote in the CE Delft report makes it clear: the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on the sprawling e-commerce marketplace Alibaba.com.
That source, though, is likely not suitable for cell culture.
Via a chat tool, I asked the Alibaba vendor if the product would be acceptable for use in pharmaceutical-grade applications.
“Dear,” she wrote back, “it’s organic fertilizer.” (In other words, it would not be.)
We already have a food system where people with enough means can pay for meat from “happy” animals.
Smaller-scale cultured meat would likely only extend that logic: You can pay extra to know your meat never lived at all.
5th Challenge - Opportunity Cost
Cell culture facilities are resource-intensive—and critics argue that, if powered by fossil fuels, their environmental footprint could be even worse than that of traditional meat. GFI’s own life-cycle analysis found that cultivated meat could have worse climate impacts than some forms of chicken and pork if conventional energy is used.
“It is a zero-sum game, to a certain extent.” Money we spend chasing cultured meat is money we can’t use on converting coal plants to biomass, or scaling [nuclear], solar and wind, or modernizing concrete and steel.
Thanks for reading, and have a science-rich weekend,
V