Now that the cultivated meat trade has achieved the long-awaited milestone of occurring sale to customers within the US, the main focus will more and more flip as to whether it’s attainable to make meat exterior the animal extra affordably. In spite of everything, it’s cool to make meat utilizing a course of that sounds straight out of pages of a science fiction novel, however most of us can’t afford to dine in eating places run by a few of the world’s most well-known cooks.
So how can we go from costs that rival the world’s most costly cuts of meat to a extra approachable worth per pound? In accordance to a brand new techno-economic evaluation (TEA) from bioreactor startup Ark Biotech, utilizing present strategies – in different phrases, with expertise and processes primarily developed by a pharmaceutical trade the place medication can price hundreds of {dollars} per ounce – we are able to get to about $29.5 per pound for cultivated meat. That’s (type of) progress, however when you think about that’s what you’d pay for a pound of filet mignon at a butcher, it’s clear that that worth per reduce is not going to reduce it.
To navigate from filet mignon costs to one thing nearer to that of floor chuck, Ark outlines 4 methods to do this within the evaluation:
- Cut back the price of media
- Enhance biomass yields
- Optimize the bioprocess
- Cut back capital spend (depreciation), primarily by way of bigger bioreactors
The TEA breaks down how a lot every lever presently contributes through the legacy manufacturing course of:
From there, they analyze cost-optimize the worth alongside all 4 price levers:
Cut back the Price of Media
Media is probably the most vital price driver at the moment. Ark believes that the worth may be diminished by “lowering media manufacturing prices (e.g., procurement, recipe), and (2) rising the cell mass per unit of media (rising extra meat with the identical quantity of media).” Additionally they discover additional price reductions by way of different strategies, together with recycling media and creating ‘match for function recipes’.
Bettering Cell Mass
Rising the cell density and rising extra mass per liter of enter is one other strategy to lower the general price per pound or, in different phrases, enhance the general manufacturing yield. Ark’s evaluation goes into vital technical element on how to take action, together with by optimizing cell strains naturally or by way of genetic modification.
Optimizing the bioprocess
One other vital lever to scale back the general price of cultivated meat is to optimize the bio-production course of, which suggests deciding on the optimum mode by which vitamins are provided to the cells within the bioreactor. In response to Ark, there are 4 major strategies for offering vitamins to cells within the bioreactor (batch, fed-batch, perfusion, and steady), and the selection of the approach entails tradeoffs in capital expense vs. ongoing price of products bought.
Greater Bioreactors
Probably the most vital capital expense in cultivated meat manufacturing is the bioreactor, these large metallic vats which develop cultivated meat. Whereas bigger bioreactors have bigger worth tags, the capital price per unit of cultivated meat decreases as manufacturing quantity will increase. Factoring in that the prices of working a bioreactor are largely fastened, the short-short is that greater bioreactors imply decrease costs per pound of meat produced.
The evaluation concludes that to get to pricing that approaches the commodified worth of conventional floor beef, a mix of enhancements (i.e., lever changes) is required. Exhibit 1 reveals how a lot progress every lever will contribute to lowering the associated fee per pound of cultivated meat.
It goes with out saying that Ark has a major quantity of self-interest in arriving at these conclusions. Nonetheless, from what I can see, the evaluation is a fairly considerate evaluation of what drives the prices of cultivated meat and the place the trade must go to decrease the worth per pound.
After all, they go into a lot better element within the full report, so I’d counsel these test it out.
