Bill Gates and Richard Branson bet on lab-grown meat startup

Authored by cnbc.com and submitted by gone_his_own_way
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Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups.

Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from "fake meat," like the soy protein "chicken" you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal. But lab-grown meat leads most skeptical diners to think of a big hurdle: taste.

"When they taste the product, they have to have the experience of meat, not the experience of a product that looks like meat and comes close to meat or has the distinct hints of something that looks like meat," said Peter Verstrate, the CEO of MosaMeat. "It just has to be meat."

"The ultimate filter is, 'Does it taste exactly like the meat you're used to?'" said Josh Tetrick, CEO of clean meat start-up JUST, who already tasted success with JUST Mayo.

There are two business-world barometers for clean-meat products that are make-or-break as well: price and scale.

Right now clean meat is much more expensive to produce than traditional meat because of scaling and infrastructure. The land, feed, farmers, slaughterhouses and transportation are already in place to produce meat from dead animals. Growing clean meat may be more efficient and will require less total marginal costs in the end, but until the systems needed to grow clean meat on a large scale exist, it will be more expensive.

abgonzo7588 on March 23rd, 2018 at 15:03 UTC »

It's gonna take a little while but once they can grow cuts like briskets, prime rib roasts, tenderloins, with as much marbling as they please it will take over the market. Ideally it would raise the overall quality of beef we consume, the norm would become prime and everyone could enjoy wagyu quality beef from time to time as well.

jordangoretro on March 23rd, 2018 at 14:50 UTC »

I can see McDonalds becoming a heavy adopter once the lab grown meat is advanced and cheap enough

goodsam2 on March 23rd, 2018 at 14:37 UTC »

What we need is someone to reinvent the chicken nugget/fish stick. I think it's a much harder thing to overcome to beat a nice piece of steak rather than the chicken McNuggets.

What we also need is to grow lab meat in hermetically sealed areas more local to cities and so we can go from harvesting to eating in a matter of days cutting down the need for antibiotics.