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.
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.
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.
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.
