43Bloomberg Businessweek August 20, 2018
critical mass of customers willing to pay more for pork that’s
“gestation-crate-free.”
In early 2018, Whitmore ate a multi-thousand-dollar
serving of meatballs. They were made from pan-seared duck
meat harvested fresh from the petri dishes of Memphis Meats.
“It tasted like duck, because it is duck,” he says. “At a molecu-
lar level, what I had was duck” but grown without the bones,
organs, skin, and feathers.
The production of cultured meats, or “cell-based meats,”
as Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti calls them, begins with the
extraction of tissue samples from a live or recently slaughtered
animal. Those “starter cells” are replicated using a protein
medium that stimulates growth inside a bioreactor, essentially
an ultrasophisticated Crockpot. “The cultured cells are alive,
just not attached to the animal,” Valeti says. They’re so alive,
in fact, that the mature muscle tissue produced in the biore-
actor will actually respond—as in lex, or spasm—when stimu-
lated with electricity.
The notion that a serving of cultured meat had once been
lexing in a laboratory might send some consumers running
to the tofu section, but not Hayes. He declined to do the tast-
ing, but only because the sample cost hundreds of dollars per
ounce of meat, and he needed Whitmore’s team to compare
the product to the dozens of meat alternatives they’d already
tasted. (“It was not because I didn’t want to try it.” Hayes says.
“I do!”) Within a few weeks of sampling Memphis, Tyson had
agreed to back the company.
Hayes says lab-grown protein can be every bit as nutritious
and lavorful as meat. It can be used to produce all manner
of animal and ish products, and it requires a fraction of the
resources. He especially likes that cultured meats eliminate
concerns about E. coli and other pathogens that can contami-
nate animal meat during processing. The single biggest risk in
his business, he says, is contamination. The major hitch with
lab-grown meat is cost, but Hayes notes that in three years,
it’s already come down from more than $100,000 per ounce.
Although lab-grown meats are a few years from hitting the
market, plant-based proteins have already proved commer-
cially successful. In April two major burger chains, Shake Shack
and White Castle, introduced plant-based burgers. The latter’s
Impossible Slider, a $1.99 ofering mixed with synthetic animal
blood, made by Beyond Meat competitor Impossible Foods
Inc., was heralded as “one of America’s best fast-food burg-
ers” by online magazine Eater.
Beyond Meat has more than doubled its sales since Tyson’s
irst investment in late 2016, and it’s spread to 20,000 grocery
stores, including Kroger, Walmart, and Target. Last December,
Tyson led another round of investment to help Beyond Meat
triple its production. “We got attacked when we signed a deal
with Tyson. People said I personally have blood on my hands,”
says Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown, a lifelong
vegan. “Tyson took a big risk, too. I mean Hayes didn’t get any
love letters when he backed us. But I’d much rather try to get
things done than throw stones, and the people at Tyson know
how to move the needle.”
Beyond Meat products use less land and water than
animal-based meat and produce far lower greenhouse gas
emissions, but Hayes doesn’t pretend to be making these
investments out of the goodness of his bacon-loving heart.
His driving motivation, he says, is the consumer. In the last
year, according to Nielsen data, retail sales of plant-based
foods have jumped 24 percent—quadruple the growth of meat
sales and more than 10 times that of retail food sales gener-
ally. A study by market research irm NPD Group found that
70 percent of meat eaters are substituting non-animal pro-
teins at least once a week.
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?” Hayes says. He
acknowledges that ethical consumption “has just begun to
build momentum and will grow as the younger generations
increase their purchasing power.” Some of his suppliers
aren’t so gung-ho about so-called plant-based meat. The U.S.
Cattlemen’s Association iled a petition with the Department
of Agriculture to block plant-based protein companies from
labeling their products as a form of meat.
For now, “90-plus percent of the world eats meat,” Hayes
says, “and the global population is expected to surge by about
2.5 billion people in the next 30 years,” while the world’s
growing middle classes demand diets richer in protein. The
combination of population growth and rising environmen-
tal pressures means the new protein demand will have to be
met by more than animals.
Today, virtually all of Tyson’s $40 billion in annual reve-
nue still comes from animal slaughter and processing, and
the company may be in talks to acquire chicken-nugget
maker Keystone Foods. The new oferings Hayes touted in the
Discovery Center—the nut-and-cheese snack from Jimmy Dean,
a home-delivery meal kit that bundles Tyson’s organic meat
with misshapen fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go
to waste, and a protein snack released in May under the brand
¡Yappah! that’s made from chicken trimmings, spent grains,
and upcycled vegetable pulp—are creative, but will hardly dis-
rupt America’s demand for animal meat.
Hayes says he “can’t imagine a world where there aren’t
animals raised and used for human consumption—in my life-
time, anyway.” Nothing from a petri dish or a soy extruder,
he reasons, will ever fully conjure the eating experience of
crispy fried bacon or a grilled T-bone steak. But he does see
animal-free proteins eventually becoming “a substantial part”
of the $200 billion market for meat. Hayes says the variety of
approaches to meatless meat production will be crucial to the
sector’s long-term success: “Just as you see many diferent elec-
tric car models on the market right now, there won’t be a silver
bullet—customers love choice.” Tyson plans to remain an inves-
tor rather than a producer of these products “until they mature
a bit more,” he says, but alternative meat production will likely
happen in-house down the line. “If we can grow the meat with-
out the animal, why wouldn’t we?” —With Megan Durisin