Chicken nuggets for the low, low price of $23

Source: Politico | February 16, 2021 | Michael Grunwald

MAKING CHICKENS OBSOLETE — “Meat” from plants is the new big thing in Earth-friendly, animal-friendly food trends. But meat grown from cells could be the next, next big thing.

Big money is starting to flow, and regulation will be next. Investment in cultured meat jumped about sixfold in 2020. Today, there are about 70 cell-based startups globally, up from four in 2015, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit advocate for alternatives to animal agriculture.

But unlike plant-based burgers and cuts sold at almost every U.S. supermarket and fast-food joint, meat cultured from animal cells can be purchased at only one establishment on the planet: a private club called 1880 in Singapore, where diners can order a Chinese-American entree with four lab-grown chicken nuggets for $23.

The fusion dish is mostly an awareness-raising play by Eat Just, a San Francisco firm that won the world’s first regulatory approval for cultured meat in Singapore in December. But it’s also the starting gun for a race to produce a new genre of protein that could be the future of food.

Memphis Meats, another San Francisco company, raised $186 million last year, more than the entire industry raised before last year. San Diego startup BlueNalu raised $60 million in January and Israel-based Aleph Farms this month unveiled the first cell-based ribeye steak, the holy grail in alternative protein.

“When I started working on this, the only companies in this space were in stealth mode,” Good Food Institute policy director Jessica Almy said. “What’s happening now is just amazing. There’s such a rush of innovation to shift the impact of our food.”

The goal is to produce the meat people crave without slaughtering animals, flooding our systems with antibiotics, or cutting down forests to feed livestock. One third of the Earth’s arable land is devoted to grazing or growing animal feed.

The challenge will be getting costs low enough to compete with butchered meat and even premium-priced veggie “meat.” An Eat Just nugget tastes like chicken, but cost $90 to make in 2019.

The company still loses money on every chicken nugget it sells in Singapore, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said. But manufacturing costs are plummeting, and Tetrick is confident the efficiencies of growing chicken meat without growing chicken feathers or beaks will make chicken farming obsolete.

One problem is the still-exorbitant costs of growth media—the material used to feed the cells. The other problem is scale. Tetrick’s business model depends on scaling up from the 200 customers he’s served so far to millions, and from a 1,000-liter bioreactor that’s about as tall as he is to a monster machine 500 times larger.

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