Is Cell-cultured Meat a financially viable product or a marketing dream?

Rethink X: Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030.

A critic by Prof Paul Wood

This report was released in Sept 2019 and made some radical statements about the future of the Livestock Industries in the USA.

 Their major conclusions were:

1.   The cost of proteins will be 5 times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035.

2.   Hence by 2030 modern food production will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as animal-derived products.

3.   By 2030 the number of cows in the USA will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt.

4.   All of these predictions are based on their view of advances in precision biology and that through precision fermentation this technology will allow for a totally new model of food production.

5.   The whole of the cow milk industry will start to collapse once these technologies are used to produce the individual proteins in milk and this industry will be bankrupt by 2030.

Many people will be shocked by these predictions and some may also fear for the future of their livelihoods. Let me assure them that they need not worry.

What is precision biology and precision fermentation? It is the ability to produce mammalian proteins at scale, using modern recombinant fermentation technologies. These technologies are already being used to product recombinant monoclonal antibodies, which are now some of the largest selling human medicines. A major assumption made by Rethink is that the cost of production of recombinant proteins will be reduced by over a hundred-fold.

The sole source of technical information for these predictions about the cost of recombinant protein production is, The Good Food Institute (GFI). The GFI released a report in Feb 2019 titled, “An analysis of culture medium cost and production volumes for cell-based meat.” This document proports to be a detailed scientific analysis, however the GFI is a think tank created in 2016 to promote alternative protein alternatives. Unfortunately, they make a number of assumptions in their report that are difficult to justify and would not be supported by professionals involved in commercial protein fermentation.

1.   The manufacturing facilities for cell-based meat will resemble a food production environment more than a biopharmaceutical manufacturing suite. This includes the assumption that they can use lower grades of raw materials and will not need to follow good manufacturing practices (GMP) requirements for media production.

2.   They do not include the operational costs such as labour, energy or capital expenditure in their models.

3.   The cost of cell culture media will provide the greatest marginal cost contribution in industrial-scale production. Their estimates range from 55-95% of the cost of production.

4.   For their model they use a final volume of 20,000L in a fermentation vessel and a 40-day production cycle.

5.   A standard serum free culture medium used by the Pharmaceutical industry they state is $400US per litre. The vast majority of the cost of this medium (over 99%) is attributed to the 4 growth factors (GF) in this media e.g. insulin, transferrin.

6.   They also state that even if the cost of the GF were reduced to zero, further cost reductions in the basal medium formulation would be required for cell-based meat to approach price parity with industrial animal meat.

7.   They then run a range of theoretical scenarios on how you might reduce the costs of the media. These include reducing the concentration of the 4 GF 10-fold, significantly reducing the cost of production of the GF, reducing the cost of the basal media and then combining all of these cost reductions.

8.   They estimate that the final yield of cultured meat would be 3,500Kg per batch and this would require on average 80,000L of media due to the cycles of media replacement.

9.   Using these figures, they estimate that currently a kg of cell cultured meat would cost about $9,000 to produce. Then with all of their assumptions about how they would reduce these costs they estimate a figure of $5.50 per Kg. This is over a 1600- fold cost reduction.

Let's now look at the major assumptions used by both Think X and the GFI.

The GFI report is focused mainly on cell-cultured meat to produce burgers or sausages. Their major mistakes are to assume that they can use lower standards of production for a technology that requires highly skilled staff, rigorous attention to protocols and exists in a highly regulated environment. I would expect that the FDA would be the regulatory agency for these products, and they will demand GMP standards for manufacture.

Their estimates for possible costs reductions ignore the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has spent the last 2 decades optimizing the production of recombinant proteins and to assume that they will be able to make massive savings is naive.

To only focus on the cost of the cell culture media ignores the other major costs of manufacture such as labour and energy. The estimates I have, indicate that media is actually only around 20% of the overall costs. A recent paper from Oxford estimated that if the energy cost for cell-based meat were not exclusively from renewable sources then the environmental cost would be higher than for conventional animal-based meats.

Capital expenditure is the major issue that has been totally ignored. The cost of a 20,000L stainless steel, water-jacketed, steam sterilizable incubation vessel is around $250K US. You then need to estimate how many of these vessels will be required and the cost of the facility to house these vessels, which will need to be temperature controlled given the heat generated from running these vessels at 38C.Even without doing a full facility costing we are talking about tens of millions to build and validate. Also, no mention is made of the fact that all of these procedures will need to be aseptic to avoid contamination of the cultures.

The Rethink X report in fact covers two quite separate technologies, cell-based meat production using all of the GFI assumptions and what I would term as molecular meat. To my knowledge I am not aware of any company currently planning to produce molecular meat or any research group who have developed this technology. The basic concept is to produce all of the individual proteins in meat or milk as recombinant proteins and then mix them together with other molecules such as fats and sugars to produce a steak or milk.

For milk it is easier to envisage how you would produce this product as it is a liquid product but even there the formulation and cost would be challenging.

For red meat the closes technology I can think of is the idea of creating artificial organs using collagen scaffolds seeded with the appropriate cell types. Molecular meats take this concept to a whole new level with 3D printing of tissue using individual proteins.

Let’s assume that the above concept can be developed and at a cost equivalent to traditional meat or milk production. There is still a major problem that is never mentioned in this report and that is your final product is a 100% genetically modified food. Ask Monsanto how well genetically modified crops (GMO’s) have been accepted by a significant part of the consumer population.

My conclusions are:

1.     They have a long way to go to prove that it is technically possible to produce molecular meat or milk.

2.    The full cost of manufacture for molecular meat or cell-based meat is significantly higher than their estimates and very unlikely to match current red meat production.

3.   The capital cost for a facility to produce these types of products will be significant and the returns on this type of investment are questionable.

4.   Consumer acceptance of these products and in particular a GMO steak has not been considered and will impact uptake of these types of foods.