Lab-grown food may be the next great investment boom – and save the world in the process
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Cellular agriculture is where solar power was 20 years ago, and EV batteries were 10 years ago.
Moore’s Law is cutting costs from exorbitant levels to something closer to “griddle parity” at lightning-speed. It is a fair bet that “cell-ag” will become the next Nasdaq darling as investors tire of the AI boom.
It is no longer science fiction to envisage a day when half the world’s meat and dairy industry is displaced by food grown in steel bioreactors or precision fermentation vats, without the need to slaughter animals, deplete aquifers or chop down Amazonia to grow feed.
Venture capital funds can already see the fortunes to be made from disrupting and undercutting today’s agro-industrial regime. “Once we get to scale I am absolutely convinced that we’ll be able to produce food at the same price or cheaper than traditional food within five years,” said Jim Mellon, founder of Agronomics.
It is hard for a small investor to buy into this story. The start-ups are all private equity ventures. His London fund is the only listed equity in the world today that offers a pure play on this technology, with a portfolio of holdings covering meat, dairy, dog food, fish, chocolate, leather and cotton.
One favourite is BlueNalu, which is developing Pacific bluefin tuna for the Asian market. Bluefin costs $80 (£65) a pound at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish stalls. “BlueNalu can make it for $25, with a 100pc return on their first plant,” he said.
None of this should be confused with those plant-based foods that sit forlornly on supermarket shelves, trying to mimic beef burgers or sausages. Nor should they be conflated with Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, media stars that have plummeted back to earth. Cell-ag is a radically different technology.
“We don’t invest in plant-based foods. They are ultra-processed and cost two to three times more. They’re not good for the environment either,” said Mr Mellon.
It first became possible to buy a cow-free milk cappuccino at a Seattle Starbucks two years ago. Perfect Day makes the milk by instructing yeast-cells to create the right proteins from the DNA of a Montana dairy cow called Dominette.
The process does not need antibiotics or steroids, routinely added in the industrial dairy factories of the US and China, some numbering 30,000 cows that live in hangars and scarcely see daylight. It emits 97pc less CO2. It uses 99pc less water. The cappuccino tastes fine.
Cultivating beef, chicken and pork from animal cells is harder, but you can today sit down for a lab-grown chicken skewer at Huber’s Butchery in Singapore. You would not know that this GOOD Meat chicken is grown in a bioreactor, fed for five weeks with amino-acids from pea proteins, along with corn oil, yeast and vitamins.
“If you have a chicken allergy and eat our chicken, you’re going to have an allergic outbreak: it’s still real meat,” said Josh Tetrick, GOOD Meat’s chief executive.
Mr Tetrick told the ALT protein journal Green Queen that it will be several years before the industry can replicate the complex texture of a steak or a pork chop. But the technology already exists to displace half the meat sold today across the planet. “Ground beef, sausages, chicken nuggets, we can do all that now,” he said.
He says it will be years before the industry can replicate the complex texture of a steak or a chicken breast. It already has technology to displace half the meat sold today across the planet. “Ground beef, sausages, chicken nuggets, we can do all that now,” he said.
Singapore is the world’s roll-out laboratory. It is open to technology. It has no agro-industrial lobby in the way. It is worried about food security. This is the perfect combination for fast-track regulation. The US approved GOOD Meat in June. Britain will follow soon as it diverges from the EU’s ag-tech obscurantism.
This hybrid chicken is not yet “bio-identical”. It is still a work in progress with some plant content. But the pure meat threshold is about to be crossed by Agronomics’ Good Dog Food in the UK, to be released this winter and sold at Pets at Home. “It will be the first 100pc cultivated meat sold in the world,” said Mr Mellon.
You can see the beauty of cell-grown food. It takes 28 months to raise a beef cow. “We can do it in 40 days from one sample of stem cells,” he said.
Some 70pc of crops grown worldwide are used for animal feed. As a rule of thumb, cows consume 25 times more protein than they produce, chickens six times more. “We think we can reach a ratio of 2:1,” he said.
Krijn de Nood from Dutch start-up Meatable says cultivated meat will have a higher nutritional value than farmed meat. “I don’t see a reason why you wouldn’t buy it. You’d be crazy to say: ‘I want that dead animal’,” he told the recent SynBioBeta forum.
As always with new technology, there is a cottage industry of critics claiming that it can never be done at viable cost. This reached a crescendo of negativism two years ago. The market is sorting out the problems faster than opponents can keep up.
One giant obstacle has been cleared away. Lab-meat requires “growth media” such as insulin or factor 8 to replicate what animals do naturally. This has in the past come from the biotech sector from bovine foetal serum, costing hundreds of dollars a litre. The industry has found a way to slash costs by as much as 99pc using recombinant plant proteins instead.
Today the tiny fleet of bioreactors is almost 50 years old. It will take thousands of these vats to launch cell-ag on a global scale. But that is how wind and solar began. Now they provide 90pc of all power added globally each year.
Agronomics has taken matters into its own hands. Its subsidiary Liberation Labs is building the world’s biggest contract bioreactor in Indiana, the first of four at $300m a shot.
Much of the Western public will resist, though it is amazing what they routinely eat today. Meat and dairy are intimately linked with who we are, interwoven with cultural identity and national cuisine.
The first-movers are likely to be in the Gulf and city states with no pasture. They will be in China where water is running out and ever-rising food imports are a strategic liability.
Vested interests are starting to resist furiously but they are not fools. Cargill, Tyson, Nestle, and Brazil’s JBS are all investing in cell-ag as a hedge. “They can see the writing on the wall,” said Mr Mellon.
It will not mean the end of Welsh hill farms or “pasture for life” herds in Kent. It will push the UK further towards a Swiss system of support for rural traditions and niche livestock.
Lab-farming should help us meet surging world food demand as another two billion people move up the protein ladder. Ultimately it will eat into Big Ag’s $5 trillion market. We can then restore degraded lands and start reclaiming our forests.
And yes, it is going to make another wave of tech investors filthy rich.
