In 2021, chemical engineer and engineering consultant Dave Humbird PhD published a widely-publicized techno-economic analysis (TEA) concluding that cultivated meat faced intractable challenges at food scale. Four years later, claims a new report from foodtech investor Lever VC, “Humbird and peers have been proven spectacularly wrong.”
On paper, cultivated meat looks like a no-brainer. Unlike plant- or fungi-based options, it has the allure of “real” meat without the ethical and environmental baggage, coupled with the promise of food security, which is moving up the agenda in many countries due to supply chain disruptions.
In practice, however, there’s no playbook for biomanufacturing meat at scale, funding has begun to dry up, and the political environment has become increasingly hostile in key markets such as the US and parts of Europe.
But from a purely technical perspective, significant progress has been made since the Humbird TEA came out with just “tens of millions of dollars” in funding for the nascent industry, claims Lever VC, although it acknowledges that it will be “many years if not decades before we’ll have a sense of how the cultivated meat sector as a whole will ultimately fare.”
Media costs coming down, cell densities going up
According to Lever VC, which has invested in multiple cultivated meat startups including UPSIDE Foods (which has just engaged in another round of layoffs that includes COO Amy Chen) Clever Carnivore, Mission Barns and Aleph Farms, “Media costs are already up to 10-30x cheaper than the Humbird TEA thought possible.
“Today numerous cultivated meat companies are producing cultivated meat using media that costs $1 per liter or less and several are under $0.50 per liter.” Believer Meats for example, cited media costs of $0.63/L in a peer-reviewed paper last year.
Meanwhile, “Maximum cell densities [the number of cells in a given volume of culture medium, a key metric that helps determine how efficiently cells are growing and how productive a bioreactor is] are already up to 50% higher than the Humbird TEA thought possible,” claims the report.
“Several leading cultivated meat companies have demonstrated cell densities between 60-90g/L, easily surpassing Humbird’s projections that the maximum cell density achievable in air-sparged fed batch systems was 60g/L.”
It adds: “Total COGS [cost of goods sold] are already up to 50% lower than the Humbird TEA thought possible. The above achievements in reducing media cost and increasing cell density have translated to production COGS for cell mass as low as $10-15/kg, with some leading-edge companies achieving costs below $10/kg today. These current-day COGS, as well as media costs and cell densities achieved, have been vetted by Lever VC across numerous companies in the cultivated meat sector.”
Cost-reduction strategies
According to Lever VC, companies are employing a range of strategies to drive down costs, including blending small amounts of cultivated meat or fat with plant-based ingredients, focusing on producing basic cell mass (undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells) rather than fully structured tissue, producing media components such as growth factors inhouse, developing novel bioreactors, and exploring continuous or semi-continuous production processes.
Other innovations such as spontaneous immortalization of cells (such that they will reproduce almost indefinitely without genetic engineering), suspension culture (growing cells without microcarriers), and adaptation to low-cost growth media containing reduced growth factor varieties and concentrations can also “massively reduce opex and capex in a variety of different ways,” claims Lever VC.
Humbird: Citations needed…
Asked to respond to Lever VC’s report, Dave Humbird told AgFunderNews that his original paper did not say that media costs would bottom out at $6.50/L, as Lever VC suggests (although its report also notes that Humbird’s TEA suggests $2.50/L “in the most optimistic scenario”) but said that he had made some calculations after the fact and got to a figure of $3/L.
He added: “More to the point, comparing media costs on a $/L basis is odious, since you additionally need to provide either (a) the concentrations of media components in the liter, or (b) total liters required to make a kilo of cell mass. This is basic, basic stuff.”
A “few quantitative misrepresentations of my work aside,” he said, “If Lever VC would care to cite some studies that back up its many ‘companies have achieved’ claims, then I would be willing to review those. But as far as I know, such evidence does not exist outside of said companies’ press releases, which are also not cited.
“Since I am far from the only investigator to be critical of the economics of cultured meat, this ‘report’ just reads like a tacky ad hom on a five-year-old paper that no one even really talks about anymore. I wish Lever VC and its portfolio companies enduring success.”
Nick Cooney, managing partner at Lever VC, told us: “Humbird’s published TEA does lay out some scenarios involving low-cost hydrolysates and minimal animal acids that could allow media cost to reach $2.50 – $3.00 per liter, but it also makes clear that it does not think those outcomes are likely to be reached. The paper doesn’t explicitly use the $6.50 per liter number, but if you calculate the approximate cost per liter that would be implied by the other data points and assumptions the TEA uses in its analysis and charts, you get to very roughly $6.50 per liter of media.”
He acknowledged Humbird’s point that what ultimately matters when it comes to media costs is how many liters it takes to make a kilo of cultivated meat, and what is the feed conversion ratio is, but added: “The media costs that we cited aren’t watered-down media formulations, or media that results in low productivity.
“For most of the companies we are citing, we know from our technical due diligence the concentrations of the media components per liter, and we know the total liters required to make a kilo of cell mass, and can attest that the numbers in our report are based on a true apples-to-apples comparison.
“As this specific information on each company is protected under NDA though, we are not able to put any specifics into this public report.”
Lever VC: ‘Disconnect between published research and on-the-ground reality’
As for why Lever VC didn’t cite more published research, it’s because there is so little out there, said Cooney. “The reason we drafted and shared this report is exactly because of this major disconnect between the costs projected in published research and TEAs and the on-the-ground reality of costs at leading cultivated meat companies.”
Most private companies, he said, “are not going to publish their methodology and formulations in peer-reviewed studies, as that information represents extremely valuable trade secrets. As a VC fund, Lever is in the unique position whereby startups are (under NDA) willing to share with us highly detailed technical reports and data.”
He added: “We are certainly not trying to attack Mr. Humbird or his research specifically. Our report uses his TEA as a reference point because it is by far the most-cited paper on the topic and because his projections were referenced by major publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg in expressing skepticism of the cultivated meat sector. Google Scholar lists 200 citations for his paper, including over a dozen studies published in the past three months alone.
“Our goal with publishing the report is simply to help the public better understand the actual cost of media and cost of production that leading cultivated meat companies are reaching today, given those actual costs are far lower than what has been projected in past TEAs and cited in the media.”
Elliot Swartz: ‘More optimistic’ about techno-economics of cultivated meat
Elliot Swartz, PhD, principal scientist, cultivated meat, at nonprofit the Good Food Institute, said he couldn’t comment on specific numbers in the Lever VC report but said he had “personally become more optimistic about the techno-economics of cultivated meat production since the publication of Dave’s analysis, based on the progress I’ve seen or learned about within the sector.”
He added: “We are currently working on an analysis that will shed more light on media costs, but I cannot share any findings yet until it is completed and published later this year.”
Vow: ‘Unit margin positive in a couple of months’
His comments came as Sydney, Australia-based cultivated meat startup Vow got the preliminary green light from regulators to market its premium cultivated Japanese quail products (first reported by Green Queen) in Australia and New Zealand.
The firm, which is now operating a 20,000-liter bioreactor—the largest food grade vessel in the nascent cultivated meat sector—will be “unit margin positive in a couple of months,” George Peppou told AgFunderNews.
Echoing points from Lever VC’s report on next-generation bioreactors, Peppou noted that Vow’s custom 20,000-liter vessel was designed and built in-house by former SpaceX engineers and commissioned in under 14 weeks for “well under $1 million,” which he claimed was less than 80% of an off-the-shelf system with biopharma specs would have cost.
According to Peppou, the simplified bioreactor design is less capital intensive but also lowers operating costs.
And further efficiencies may still be possible, he said. “Our latest focus is, we want to see if we can delete the entire sampling process, for example.
“Right now, we do a sample every day, so you get a bottle, you autoclave it, you connect it, you steam through the bottle, you then open the valve, and there’s always a risk [of contamination] anytime you open the sterile envelope. And so we have a project running in our data team asking can we just look at the data that comes from solid state sensors and the harvests themselves? If we harvest often enough, can we just measure these outside of the sterile envelope and simplify our equipment even further?
“If we can do it, this would basically delete the single most time-consuming unit operation, which is sampling.”
Distinct, novel products, more favorable unit economics
According to Vow’s regulatory filings with Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), it is using fibroblasts isolated from embryos of Japanese quail that are immortalized such that they can proliferate almost indefinitely under the right conditions in suspension (i.e., they don’t have adhere to anything). According to Vow, this capability was achieved through selection of spontaneously immortalized cells rather than genetic engineering.
While you aren’t going to displace industrial animal agriculture with novelties served in high-end restaurants, cultivated quail is a more logical starting point for a startup with limited scale than chicken nuggets, said Peppou, who co-founded Vow in 2019 with Tim Noakesmith.
“A key part of the proposition to fine dining chefs was that they can serve something that no one else has and no one else can have,” said Peppou, who said Vow has raised $56 million to date.
Peppou is also upfront about the fact that Vow’s first generation products are not structured products in which cells have differentiated and matured into recognizable muscle tissue. Instead, Vow is proliferating undifferentiated cells in a bioreactor as fast and cost-effectively as possible, said Peppou, adding that Vow’s cell lines are “not very growth factor dependent” and do not require albumin, a protein widely used in serum-free media formulations.
“We use low concentration of two growth factors only and do not use any albumin. And all of our media in production is and always has been animal-free and chemically defined.”
While differentiated cells have different qualities, he said, it didn’t make sense to add cost and complexity for a first-generation product when Vow could deliver something fast to the market at lower cost with a far simpler production process.
“I’ve always said that my goal is to make unparalleled, distinctive premium novel foods and experiences that are offering a compelling value proposition to the consumer, not to perfectly replicate every element of animal tissue.”
Second generation products with texture, but without tissue engineering
Vow has been selling cultivated quail products in restaurants in Singapore for over a year and hopes to get the final go-ahead to sell products in Australia and New Zealand in June, said Peppou.
“We’ll start in restaurants and then move to retail likely in Q3 with the foie gras and the parfait. The parfait is a really simple retail product. You put it in a jar and you have a ready to eat, high quality parfait with a nice long shelf life, and it doesn’t oxidize when you serve it.
“The foie gras is also interesting to the Australian market because unpasteurized foie gras has never been available here, so we see this being very much for cooking enthusiasts. It’s a dinner party product.”
Peppou explained: “We’ve been very successful so far with these occasional products. The next challenge is to move from occasional consumption products to habitual consumption products, which will mean moving from homogeneous textures like foie gras to more center of plate options, which we’re working on now.
“So we have three different texturing technologies we’re working on in parallel. Some we’ve developed completely in-house, some we’re working on with partners. We’re looking at both ready to eat products, essentially charcuterie, as well as center of the plate cooked proteins.”
But notably, the texturizing processes do not take place in a costly secondary bioreactor or involve tissue engineering, he stressed.
“We’ve tested in-bioreactor tissue modeling and the product benefit just isn’t there. Right now, the only people that care whether you’re doing something in a bioreactor are scientists that work in this sector. There’s about 50 of them and they’re not a very interesting market for me.
“I’m quite happy for them to look down their nose at us for not texturizing in a bioreactor,” added Peppou, who has said previously that many startups in the space “massively over promised and under delivered.”
Grounds for optimism?
Stepping back, he said, “I don’t think my view has changed since founding the company, which is that the thing that makes cell culture compelling as a food technology is not making the food we already have today. You have to do something new and different.
“Amid all this grim news of bans and bankruptcies and layoffs, you can walk into any one of several dozen restaurants in Singapore right now, and eat cell cultured meat at a price point which is typical of normal food. And that’s not a fantasy, it’s a reality which exists today.”
Further reading:
Aleph Farms lands $29m to commercialize lower-cost whole-cut cultivated steak
Mission Barns secures FDA approval for cultivated fat, gears up for US launch
Inside the UK cultivated meat regulatory sandbox with Mosa Meat, Hoxton Farms, and BlueNalu
ProFuse Technology expands focus from cultivated meat to drug discovery amid GLP-1 drug boom
Cultivated Meat at a crossroads: Highlights from the Tufts cell ag innovation day
The post The death of cultivated meat has been greatly exaggerated, says report as Vow predicts it will soon be ‘unit margin positive’ appeared first on AgFunderNews.
发布者：Elaine Watson，转转请注明出处：https://robotalks.cn/the-death-of-cultivated-meat-has-been-greatly-exaggerated-says-report-as-vow-predicts-it-will-soon-be-unit-margin-positive/
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