Rethinking Cultivated Meat: How Technology Licensing Reduces Capital Burdens

Author: Cecilia Chang, Deputy CEO of Mission Barns

At Mission Barns, we have developed a novel proprietary bioreactor that allows us to cultivate animal fat at larger volumes and cheaper than ever before. However, to really make a dent in the meat market, we will need many large versions of our bioreactors to be producing cultivated meat. And building hundreds of manufacturing factories across the world is neither cheap nor easy.

There’s been a lot of talk about the “missing middle” for the financing of deeptech or climate-tech companies i.e. where promising innovations stall between early/growth stage venture and infrastructure investors funding large-scale deployment. Venture focuses on building the first of something, while infrastructure capital prefers funding the n-th of something. This missing middle can leave promising technologies stalled, preventing them from reaching the critical tipping point where costs drop significantly and scalability becomes achievable.

Many companies, including cultivated meat companies like Mission Barns, need to find ways to finance the large-scale deployment of their manufacturing technology. So how are we planning to tackle this problem at Mission Barns?

Our B2B approach

1. Licensing our platform to major food manufacturers to scale without heavy capital investment

By licensing our technology to partners who have a lot of the existing infrastructure, the experience, and the balance sheet to deploy our technology at large-scale, we will be able to grow the business with a fraction of the capital needs. Our core competencies to date have been in innovating groundbreaking methods for cultivating fat, not in the more capital-intensive process of building, operating, and maintaining manufacturing facilities.

Much like how Microsoft’s licensing strategy for its Windows operating system allowed it to become the dominant platform for personal computers, our goal is to become a key enabling technology for meat alternatives. By licensing their OS to Dell, HP, Lenovo etc., Microsoft was able to turn potential competitors into customers. This allowed them to scale rapidly, making Windows the standard in the industry faster than they could have on their own. Without this licensing model, Microsoft would have been limited by the need to build and sell its own hardware, restricting its growth potential.?

Similarly, by licensing our bioreactor technology, we can scale our impact across the food system far more quickly, without the need for us to own and operate every production facility ourselves. This approach allows us to bring Mission Barns' cultivated fat to a broader consumer base, enabling a faster and more efficient market reach without the substantial capital expenditures. In other words, we will sidestep the “missing middle,” allowing us to scale rapidly without being constrained by the capital-intensive barriers that typically hinder growth.

2. Leveraging partnerships to unlock global distribution, accelerate market penetration, and unlock new product categories

Branding, marketing, and distribution of a CPG product, particularly over multiple geographies and markets with different consumer preferences, also requires significant resources and capabilities. There are many meat and CPG companies around the world who have decades of experience manufacturing, marketing, distributing food products at scale. By licensing our technology to these partners, not only are we leveraging our partners’ manufacturing experience, we are able to leverage their downstream capabilities in branding, marketing, and distribution as well. This again allows us to reduce investment in these areas, focusing more on R&D and scale-up. It also facilitates global expansion by partnering with companies with deep familiarity and existing operations with their regional markets.

What you need in order to execute a successful B2B strategy While this approach may seem straightforward, a robust technological foundation and intellectual property (IP) moat are crucial to the success of a licensing strategy. For Mission Barns, our innovative bioreactor—designed to cultivate fat more efficiently and at a lower cost—provides us with a distinct technological edge. This clear competitive advantage serves as a compelling value proposition for potential licensees, positioning us as a leader in the space and enabling us to focus on what we do best: advancing R&D and innovation.

A B2B strategy won’t work alone

There are, however, various downsides associated with a pure B2B / licensing approach. Namely, that the speed to market can be slower since you are baking in time required to negotiate a licensing deal, implement the technology transfer and also navigate the internal processes of a usually much larger incumbent. Also, the success of the end product that includes your technology / ingredient is heavily dependent on the licensees’ go-to-market strategy.?

Our approach is to pursue both a B2B licensing strategy while also selling our own branded products (meatballs, bacon, salami, etc.) in retail and foodservice (i.e. B2C). This dual strategy enables us to enter the market more rapidly, bypassing the constraints of relying solely on licensees for speed to market. Additionally, it provides us with a direct connection to consumers, allowing us to shape brand perception, engage with our audience, and gather valuable feedback that informs both product development and marketing strategies. Crucially, the success of our own branded products provides our future technology licensees with market validation and the confidence needed to adopt our production platform and venture into this new product category.

By operating in both B2B and B2C channels, we can create a balanced and diversified business model that accelerates growth and enhances the visibility of our products and technology.

Transforming our food system is a lot of work. Working together and partnering with companies across the food industry, will allow us to effect the change we want to see faster and at a larger scale than otherwise would be possible alone.

Author: Cecilia Chang is the Deputy CEO of Mission Barns, a leading cultivated fat company based out of San Francisco. Prior to this, Cecilia was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company working across a range of industries including telecommunications, banking, and mining. Her passion for working to create a more sustainable food system led her to consult for various alternative-protein companies (plant-based, precision fermentation, cultivated) before joining Mission Barns.