The future of fake meat according to two new studies
Five questions with the Good Food Institute's Dr. Elliot Swartz
Two new studies on the future of cultivated meat came out last week. Commissioned by the Good Food Institute, the research found that scaled-up and sustainably-produced cultivated proteins could have a lower carbon footprint than even chicken or pork, as well as beef, and could compete with some types of meat on price too.
Now, in case you’re wondering, yes, you can absolutely skip synthetic meat and just eat more lentils. Please do. I for one welcome our new legume overlords but I’m also open to the possibility that a bean revolution may not be in our future. While it’s not clear yet just how big of a role cultivated meat will play, these studies offer us some useful insight.
For this week’s newsletter, I posed five questions about the studies to GFI scientist Dr. Elliot Swartz.
Five Questions with Elliot Swartz, PhD
edited for length and clarity
Splitter: To start us off, what are the big takeaways?
Swartz: Well, the first thing is that we were able to source data directly from the industry. We had over fifteen different companies across the supply chain as data providers, including five of the leading cultivated meat manufacturers. That really strengthens the level of confidence that we have in the data, especially around the environmental findings.
The second takeaway is that because other studies have indicated that cultured meat could be energy intensive, we wanted to run a scenario where renewable energy was used. If you run your cultured meat facility on renewable energy, then you get the greatest gains, in terms of the environmental impact and the carbon footprint, specifically.
The techno-economic analysis was also important because there really hadn’t been any studies that assess in detail the sort of technical economics of cultured meat production, at least not relying on this level of industry data. Using existing technology and scenarios that we think are favorable but definitely possible, we can bring the cost of cultured meat into a sort of cost-competitive range with some forms of conventional meat by the end of the decade. That doesn't mean that it’s going to have the price tag of chicken or pork in the supermarket right away, but with additional technology developments and interventions, we think we can bring those costs down even further.
These studies are not supposed to just put numbers on something and say, well, that's going to happen. It’s really supposed to help you identify the largest bottlenecks that we can focus on from a research and development perspective, and also inform manufacturers and policymakers on how to leverage this technology in the best way possible.
Splitter: It looks like just five cultivated meat manufacturers participated in the study. Do you think more companies will participate in the future?
Swartz: Yes, GFI as an organization is really well-positioned to be the third party player that can organize these sorts of things, and we’ve already heard from other companies that say they want to be involved in the future. So I think this highlights that collaboration across this industry is really important to get people the most informed picture of the future. And it would be really great to update these studies using the pilot scale data that a lot of these companies have just begun to generate. We plan to update them over time.
Splitter: Okay cool, that’s exciting to hear. So, the the potential to match the carbon footprint of pork and chicken by using renewable energy is super exciting to me. I’m wondering how much renewable energy is on the radar for these companies?
Swartz: Well, if it wasn’t on their radar already, it definitely will be now: the data shows how much of a win the technology can be if you go to renewable energy. I think what makes it powerful is that this study assumed renewable energy would be used just at the facility itself, as well as to produce inputs for the media, but it doesn’t assume that the entire world is decarbonized and running on renewables.
It really puts the power in the hands of the manufacturers to go and either locate their facilities in regions where you have affordable and abundant renewable energy, which could also save them on costs as well (so there’s that incentive too), or they could also generate their own energy at the facility by, let’s say, installing solar panels.
I think Aleph Farms has stated publicly that by 2025 they aim to be net zero throughout their entire production supply chain. They’ve hired a head of sustainability and have taken certain steps to achieve those goals. I really hope that this data will drive other companies to follow in their footsteps and be a little bit more vocal about their commitment to lowering their carbon footprints, because they just have so much power to do so.
Splitter: You covered this a little in your blog post but I also want to include it here because it’s something I’m very passionate about: land use. It seems like the potential to spare land is a really critical potential benefit of cultivated meat beyond just the carbon footprint. People often don’t realize the huge land use requirements of livestock, and also the constant creep of agricultural expansion and how that creep impacts the environment and biodiversity. So what are some ways we can reclaim and protect existing land?
Swartz: Yeah, I'm not an expert on these sorts of things but I do elaborate about the carbon opportunity cost of land in our policy summary. There’s been some recent studies that look at pretty refined satellite data and run these simulations saying, well, if the world went 70% plant-based or 100% vegan, this is the amount of land that you can recover and, subsequently, this is the amount of carbon that you can sequester in the land. Because the amount of land that you need to produce cultured meat is on par with tofu and other sorts of plant-based meat products, the carbon opportunity cost there is similar.
We highlight the opportunity to rewild land as one of the largest long-term levers for further carbon sequestration, as well as preventing or mitigating biodiversity loss. These things are definitely important from a longer term perspective, as it takes a while, I think, to start sequestering a large amount of carbon as you regrow or rewild environments, but it’s such a huge lever that we have to use that.
Now, the complicated part is really the policy side. If a farmer is growing soy for the animal feed industry and now they only need to grow five or 10% of that soy, where does all that land go? We have to come up with incentive structures or solutions to make sure that those farmers can still get paid and contribute in this new economy. They’re not going to just not use 80% of the land or whatever it may be if there aren’t incentives in place. So we’re going to need to do a lot of that to really boost the rate at which we decarbonize over the following two decades.
Splitter: And then my final question is about reducing costs of the growth medium or the nutrients used to grow cultivated meats. Because these companies are so protective of their intellectual property, I know very little about what’s actually in the growth medium now that it’s not made with serum. Can you shed any light on the efforts to make the medium cheaper, and whether these nutrients will be plant-based and just what’s in them?
Swartz: Well, I’ll mention right now there’s a study related to this that I’m leading internally. We sent a survey out to all the cultivated meat manufacturers as well as suppliers of growth factors and media to get a little bit more insight into the current options. I’ll be turning my full attention to that in the next month or so.
Making serum-free media has been well known for quite a while in other applications. It’s just that we have to sort of start fresh in this industry. Fetal bovine serum has a ton of different components in it, literally thousands. We know thanks to 30 years of cell culture what those key components are, so really it’s just a matter of creating those certain components or sourcing them in other ways.
To give you an idea of what what those are, generally the growth factors and the recombinant proteins that are in there include things like insulin. In our study, a lot of the companies are actually using a protein called albumin, which makes up about 50% of the protein component of the serum itself. In fact, albumin was actually a cost driver in our study because you have to use it at such high amounts. The way that we currently produce recombinant growth factors in proteins is pretty costly, but by using existing technologies and scaling them up and purifying them at a food grade level, it’s enough to get us at a pretty low cost price for those things into the future.
The difficulty really lies in creating a serum-free formulation that’s going to be as productive or perform as well as the bovine serum. And then bring down the cost of that serum formulation. So that’s sort of where the industry is at right now. A lot of the leading companies have stated publicly that they are using a serum-free medium formulation, but the challenge will be to get the same performance as serum over the course of the next several years.
When companies say their medium is plant-based, it’s not entirely clear to me whether that means every single component is from plants. For instance, these albumin proteins are generally animal proteins but you produce them recombinantly. I’m not sure if they’re saying “plant-based” to simplify the messaging, because generally speaking, it seems that this sort of production of key recombinant growth factors and proteins is what a lot of companies are pursuing right now. With that said, there are some formulations that are serum-free and also albumin-free, but I’m personally not sure if that’s going to be possible for all types of cultivated protein.
It would be really great to see some of these companies license the formulations of the media that they develop, and produce that for the industry as a revenue source for them. There’s just so much repetitive research going on at these companies, and it seems like some have already developed something that works well enough already. So it would be great to increase access for academia or other companies. I think it would really help the industry out.
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