Would you invest in Lab-Grown Chicken?

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Would you invest in Lab-Grown Chicken?

It's been about a week and a half since the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for the first time ever, approved the production of lab-grown chicken ( also called cultivated- or cell-based meat). Two start-ups companies, GOOD Meat (owned by Eat Just) and UPSIDE Foods, were both given the green light to start producing and to begin commercial sales of their lab-grown chicken products in the US. This is a historical moment and marks the beginning of a whole new era in meat production.

This approval makes the United States the second country in the world, after Singapore, to allow sales of cell-cultivated meat. GOOD Meat launched in Singapore in December 2020 in the foodservice channel.

Two exclusive restaurants will be able to offer its customers cultivated meat. GOOD Meat is working with chef and restaurateur José Andrés and his Washington D.C. restaurant, while UPSIDE foods is working with the three-Michelin-star chef Dominique Crenn’s restaurant in San Francisco.

Yesterday (July 1, 2023), at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, UPSIDE sold it's first cultivated chicken, which was the first ever cultivated meat served in the US.

So what is cultivated meat?

Cultivated meat is real meat, unlike meat substitutes which are plant-based. This means that cultivated meat are neither vegan or vegetarian.

To make cultivated meat the food developers use cells obtained from of a small number of healthy animals which they then grow in bioreactors. One cell sample (which is about the size of half a grain of rice) contains millions of cells. The cells are then fed a blend of nutrients made up of the same kinds of nutrients that cells would get inside an animal's body.

UPSIDE Foods explains on their website that animal cells gathered from a fertilized chicken egg are stored in a cell bank and can be used for at least ten years. This means that meat can be made without the need to raise and slaughter billions of animals!

To make an chicken filet product takes from start to finish about 3 weeks for the production process to be complete.

What are the benefits?

The traditional meat production industry has a devastating impact on the environment through greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and air and water pollution. See the following examples:

• The agricultural sector consumes about 69 percent of the planet's fresh water.

• Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture.

• Raising animals for meat causes a plethora of environmental issues from acid rain to algal blooms and accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

• Clearing land for agricultural production is a major contributor to climate change. As an example clearing land for cattle ranching is responsible for about 80% of deforestation in the Amazon.

• Animal agriculture is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity.

The benefits of cell-cultivated meat (if produced using renewable energy) is first of all, that it can reduce agriculture-related pollution and eutrophication due to the fact that it will use significantly fewer resources. The production process is also a much more efficient.

Furthermore, the lab-grown meat, which is produced in a controlled environment, is expected to occur without the use of antibiotics or pesticides.

Eager to invest yet?

GOOD Meat (founded in 2017) has raised a total of $267M in funding over 3 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 21, 2023 from a Grant round. The start-up is funded by 6 investors. The most recent investors are U.S. Department of Agriculture and Graphene Venturesare. The company's CEO is Josh Tetrick who also co-founded the company.

UPSIDE Foods (founded in 2015) has raised a total of $598M in funding over 8 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 21, 2023 from a Grant round. The start-up is funded by 41 investors. The most recent investors are U.S. Department of Agriculture and Cercano Management. Other investors in UPSIDE Foods include Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk.

The company’s CEO and founder is Uma Valeti, a cardiologist and adjunct professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

More than 150 companies, globally, from 2016-2022 are focusing on cell-cultivated meat, not only chicken but also beef, fish, lamb and pork. Together, the industry have received nearly $3 billion in investments. According to Forbes, the cell-cultured meat industry is predicted to hit $13.7 billion by 2043. Unfortunately, neither GOOD Meat or UPSIDE Foods can be publicly traded yet.

Now when the U.S. officially has given the green light to GOOD Meat and UPSIDE we can expect the cell-cultured meat industry to take off . But there's big challenges ahead for the two companies. The cultured meat industry needs to be able to scale up from smaller bioreactors to larger bioreactors which is an engineering-technical challenge. They also need to solve the production cost given it's to expensive at the moment to produce the meat for a reasonable price.

I'm curious to know, if the opportunity arise would you invest in this industry or any of these companies? Comment below