Cultivated meat industry faces ‘trough of disillusionment’

Datar starts with the shape of the first wave. Around 2014 and 2015 a cluster of venture-backed companies appeared at once, each announcing itself as the beef company, the pork company or the chicken company. She finds that structure odd, because growing meat from cells frees you from organizing a business around a single animal, and the first wave instead copied the vertically integrated structure of the industry it meant to displace. A second wave followed, more often founded by academics, selling picks and shovels: culture media, growth factors, cells. That helped, since a world where food is grown from cells needs a diverse supplier economy rather than a few companies doing everything in-house. Ten years on there are scattered approvals and tastings and nothing displacing meat.

Kann offers her a menu to rank: technical difficulty, scaling, cost, regulation. She answers it only halfway. Of his four she puts technical difficulty first, but she spends the answer moving the question upstream of all of them. Almost all of the technology for growing meat from cells comes from biomedicine, and food and medicine are separated at every level that matters, with different federal funders, different universities (land-grant agricultural schools on one side, private research schools on the other) and different degree paths. Combining them inside a single lab is hard because nobody has both skill sets and the incentives point away from trying. Below that sits a more basic gap. A biomedical researcher orders well-characterized standard cell lines from a catalog. Cellular agriculture has no equivalent, so a researcher begins at a slaughterhouse, collecting cells and turning them into something workable. You cannot ask the technical questions without the research tools, which is why she puts standard-setting ahead of the technical work, which sits ahead of scaling and regulation in turn. Her summary of a field whose companies are commercializing on top of research that does not exist yet: the world is upside down.

On cost, Kann proposes the standard framing, that cell ag borrowed tools from an industry where a kilogram of output is worth a fortune and applied them where it is worth a few dollars. Datar accepts that and adds a second reading. Biopharma set the price precedent and has no incentive to lower it, while cellular agriculture has that incentive and must act on it; design the manufacturing to look like vitamin or food processing rather than a drug plant and she thinks costs come down substantially. She declines to quote figures from the one detailed cost study she names, on the grounds that it models cultivated meat inside the biopharma paradigm and so answers a different question. She reads it as a map of where science should be applied rather than a proof of infeasibility. What she offers instead is an analogy: someone priced a batch of cookies made entirely from laboratory-grade ingredients at $30,000 for 30 cookies. The point is not that cultivated meat costs a thousand dollars a serving; it is that the ingredients currently in use are the thousand-dollar ones. When Kann restates her position as “there aren’t good numbers because they’d be ridiculously high,” she corrects him. The numbers may well be low, but they sit inside private companies, unpublished and unverifiable, which is itself a symptom of research happening in startups rather than in the open.

Her prescription follows from the diagnosis, and it is not more companies. Given a magic wand she would build two shared resources: a tunable pilot-scale facility run as open research, so that when a process fails the field learns why instead of each company privately spending its own money to find out; and a standardized cell bank, characterized and aligned with regulators in advance so approval is not re-litigated company by company. Both have a regulatory motive as well as a scientific one, because her stated fear is that whichever company reaches regulators first sets the standard for everyone and forecloses innovation, with an unsafe product reaching market the only worse outcome. Media she leaves to the private sector despite it being the largest ongoing cost, since better and cheaper media already has a paying customer in pharma. And the trough looks different depending on where you sit. Funding has contracted, but the research community is larger than it has ever been, and she says she hopes the trough deepens enough to force companies to pool what resources they have. Meanwhile the destination may move: cellular agriculture is much larger than meat, ingredients such as milk and egg proteins already have manufacturing precedent, and by her own account meat might never happen at all.