79
that’s also affordable means that we can actually sell
this product to the masses.” In May, the Fat Team fried
up a couple of teaspoons. Though they could tell from
the cell structure and lipid profile that they had created
a near identical product, they were still astonished by
the taste. “It was so intense, a rich, beefy, meaty flavor,”
says Jackisch, a vegan of six years. “It was an instant
flashback to the days when I used to eat meat. I started
craving steak again.” She nearly picked up a couple on
her way home from the lab that night.
For all the successes that cultivated- meat com-
panies have broadcast over the past few years, biotech-
nologist Ricardo San Martin, research director for the
UC Berkeley Alternative Meats Lab, is skeptical that
lab-bench triumphs will translate into mass-market
sales anytime soon, if at all. Not one of the companies
currently courting investment has proved it can man-
ufacture products at scale, he says. “They bring in all
the investors and say, ‘Here is our chicken.’ And yes,
it is really chicken, because there are chicken
cells. But not very many. And not enough for
a market.”
The skepticism is justified—very few peo-
ple outside of Israel and Singapore have actu-
ally been able to try cultivated meat. (Citing
a pending E.U. regulatory filing, Mosa de-
clined to let TIME try its burger. Eat Just of-
fered a tasting but would not allow access to
its labs.) And the rollout of Eat Just’s chicken
nuggets in Singapore raises as many ques-
tions as it answers. At the moment, the cost
to produce cultivated meat hovers around $50
a pound, according to Michael Dent, a senior
technology analyst at market- research com-
pany IDTechEx. Eat Just’s three-nugget por-
tion costs about $17, or 10 times as much as
the local McDonald’s equivalent. CEO Josh Tetrick
admits that the company is losing “a lot” on every
sale, but argues that the current production cost per
pound “is just not relevant.” At this point, says Dent,
making a profit isn’t the point. “It is not in itself a vi-
able product. But it’s been very, very successful at get-
ting people talking about cultured meat. And it’s been
very successful in getting [Eat] Just another round of
investments.”
On Sept. 20, Eat Just announced that its GOOD Meat
division had secured $97 million in new funding, add-
ing to an initial $170 million publicized in May. The
company also recently announced that it was partner-
ing with the government of Qatar to build the first ever
cultivated- meat facility in the Middle East outside of
Israel. In June, Tetrick confirmed that the company,
which also produces plant-based egg and mayonnaise
products, was mulling a public listing in late 2021 or
early 2022, with a possible $3 billion valuation. But all
that investment still isn’t enough to scale the production
process to profitability, let alone to make a dent in the
conventional meat industry, says Tetrick. “You can make
the prettiest steak in the world in the lab, but if you can’t
make this stuff at large scale, it doesn’t matter.”
The biggest obstacle to getting the cost per pound of
cell- cultivated meat below that of chicken, beef or pork,
says Tetrick, is the physical equipment. GOOD Meat
is currently using 1,200- and 5,000-liter bio reactors,
enough to produce a few hundred pounds of meat at a
time. To go large scale, which Tetrick identifies as “some-
where north of 10 million lb. per facility per year, where
my mom could buy it at Walmart and my dad could pick
it up at a fast-food chain,” would require 100,000-liter
bioreactors, which currently do not exist. Vessels that
big, he says, are an engineering challenge that may take
as long as five years to solve. GOOD Meat has never been
able to test the capacity of cell proliferation to that ex-
tent, but Tetrick is convinced that once he has the nec-
essary bioreactors, it will be a slam dunk.
San Martin, at UC Berkeley, says Tetrick’s confidence
clashes with the basics of cellular biology. Perpetual cell
division may work with yeasts and bacte-
ria, but mammalian cells are entirely differ-
ent. “At a certain point, you enter the realm
of physical limitations. As they grow they
excrete waste. The viscosity increases to a
point where you cannot get enough oxy-
gen in and they end up suffocating in their
own poo.” The only way San Martin could
see cellular agriculture working on the kind
of scale Tetrick is talking about is if there
were a breakthrough with genetic engineer-
ing. “But I don’t know anyone who’s gonna
eat a burger made out of genetically modi-
fied lab-grown cells,” he says. Mosa Meat,
based in the GMO- phobic E.U., has abso-
lutely ruled out genetic modification, and
Tetrick says his current products don’t use
GMOs either.
That said, his rush to market has led him to rely on
technologies that go against the company’s slaughter-
free (or cruelty-free) ethos. Not long after the company’s
cultivated chicken nugget was released for sale in Sin-
gapore, Tetrick revealed that FBS had been used in the
production process, even though he concedes that it is
“self- evidently antithetical to the idea of making meat
without needing to harm a life.” The company has since
developed an FBS-free version, but it is not yet in use,
pending regulatory review.
Eat Just’s initial bait and switch left a bad taste, says
Dent. Cell- cultured meat technology may be sound, but
if consumers start having doubts about the product and
what’s in it, there could be a backlash against the indus-
try as a whole, particularly if FBS continues to be used.
“The first products are what everybody will judge the
whole industry on,” says Dent. He points to the botched
rollout of genetically modified seeds in the 1990s as a
precedent. “Despite the science pointing to GMOs being
a safer, more reliable option for agriculture, they’re stillCultivated meatcould have asmuch impacton the climatecrisis as solarpower andwind energy