This seems like it’d be pretty focused on the high-end market. Last I looked, lab-grown meat cost more than traditional, and most people already aren’t feeding their dog steak.
They say that they think they can compete with the high end of the market on price if they can scale up from where they are now.
Last I looked, lab-grown meat cost more than traditional
This might change with mass production
might
For the moment, that is the important bit. All the tooling is expensive medical stuff right now (they’re even owned by a medical company) and afaik there’s also the question of how to produce a cheap, sustainable nutrient solution. Let’s see whether this takes off now or whether we’re a couple decades early.
The medical stuff will get cheaper for sure if it doesn’t need all the expensive certifications, supply chain surveillance etc
The issue is a bit different than you seem to think (and tbh, different than I accidentally wrote earlier). Lab-grown meat needs to grow in the absence of bacteria and other foreign cells which grow a lot faster than meat cells. Hence, the issue is not capex for the tooling alone, but how to scale up sterile processes in huge vessels.
cheap, sustainable nutrient solution
which kinda brings up the next point, does this type of meat have the same nutrition properties? There aren’t any studies on that yet afaik
If they use similar input to regular feed, they should have similar output. Except it’s just the meat and no bones, brains, or other animal parts that modern humans find largely inedible. However, most companies started out by using animal products as the nutrient solution (e.g. some kind of fetal serum for beef products) which meant killing animals nonetheless. Multiple companies say they have solved the issue but at the same time go around saying “proprietary! proprietary!”, so we don’t really know whether it’s just smoke and mirrors for their investors.
Vegan meat replacements already sell for much more than the real meat original, and people happily pay it, even though the ingredients are cheap.
Doesn’t seem too far fetched that they’ll find some vegans happy to pay (and able to afford to pay) a premium for this.
It’s a genius move to start with pet food. Much fewer issues with potential food safety approvals, it doesn’t have to be as perfect, there isn’t as much competition because the regular vegan substitutes would be unhealthy for meat eating animals, and they don’t have to worry about pushback from people worried that they’ll be forced to eat lab meat.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Czech start-up Bene Meat Technologies is the first to win European Union registration for laboratory-grown meat for use in pet food and plans to boost production to make up to several metric tons per day next year, the company said on Wednesday.
A number of firms are racing globally to develop commercially viable lab-grown meat and fish products to appeal to consumers concerned about ethical issues and the environmental impact of livestock farming, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Today we have become the first company globally that has an official authorisation for the production and sale of cultivated meat for cats and dogs,” Managing Director Roman Kriz told Reuters.
Kriz said the firm, like others, used cells from live animals, which grow in a vessel known as a bioreactor, fed by a supply of nutrients.
He said apart from ethical and environmental issues, another benefit was that lab-grown meat was made under full control, while a consumer could not be 100% certain about what a farm animal ate all its life.
The company is in talks with pet food makers on supplies, but also aims to work with them to potentially set up production lines at their current facilities.
The original article contains 505 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That’s fucking awesome news.
This is one of the very very few things that could be a game changer for the health of the planet.
I’m super excited for perfect death free meat.
