The Future of Meat

The cultivated meat space continues to make headlines, in particular, over the last several months. While the sector has received a significant amount of attention, there are still a lot of questions that many have. Is it better for the environment? When will product go mainstream? Will cultivated meat be the new plant-based? In a virtual roundtable hosted by JConnelly, a panel of industry leaders tied to the space in different capacities took on these key questions along with talking to their key role in driving the space forward in addition to their outlook on what is to come.

TERYN WOLFE: Before we get started, I would like to introduce our four expert panelists. We're going to start with Eric Jenkusky, who's the co-founder and CEO of Matrix Meats. Eric has more than 28 years of startup in business management experience across a variety of sectors working in 42 countries around the globe.

Next, we have Frea Mehta, who's a cell biologist at Bluu Biosciences. Frea works on scale and cultivation of fish cells at Bluu Biosciences Europe's leader in cultured seafood. She's also a co-founder and organizer of the Cellular Agricultural Online Symposium, a conference series covering ongoing research in cellular agriculture.

Mark Langley is a managing partner at Unovis Asset Management, a leader in alternative meat investments. Mark has worked as an engineer, analyst, economic consultant and as an advisor to plant-based startups.

Last but not least, we have Max Jamilly who's a co-founder of Hoxton Farms. Max has a decade of experience in life sciences with a PhD from Oxford in synthetic biology and two degrees from Cambridge in biotechnology and business. Before we get started with our conversation today, I would love for the panelists to talk briefly about their companies and about what they do. Why don't we start with Frea?

FREA MEHTA: Thanks for the introduction Teryn, and also thank you all for joining us here in learning about our exciting field. My name is Frea Mehta. I'm a cell biologist at Bluu Biosciences. We are Europe's first and only cultivated seafood company, and we're based in Lübeck, Germany right at the Baltic coast, so we get access to that fresh ocean as often as possible. At Bluu Biosciences, we're focused on scaling up the production of our fish cell lines and making delicious and nutritious seafood products that speak to a diversity of culinary traditions.

From my own background, I'm a molecular biologist and chemical engineer. I've been involved in the cultivated meat space for a few years now. I held a Fulbright Research grant in the group of Mark Post at Maastricht University, which was the group responsible for making the world's first cultivated hamburger, which sparked this new evolution of cellular agriculture that we see today. Now, I'm excited to continue the journey with Bluu and explore the unique ways in which fish cells can help us address global food security, climate, and health needs.

WOLFE: Thank you, Frea. Let's continue with Max.

MAX JAMILLY: Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with you all today, my name is Max Jamilly, I'm the co-founder of Hoxton Farms based here in London, UK. Now, we all know that demand for plant-based meat is absolutely soaring. Here at Hoxton Farms, we love plant-based meat but we think it's still not good enough, because it's missing this one crucial ingredient: fat. That's where we come in. We make real, cell-based animal fat, just without the animals. We produce cultivated fat as a business-to-business ingredient for the meat alternatives industry, starting with plant-based meat, so that plant-based meat companies can use our fat to make meat alternatives that really look, cook and taste just as good as the real thing, if not even better.

Now, the reason we focus on fat is because fat is by far the most important sensory component of all the meat that we love to eat. Whether you're talking about high-end cuts of meat, like Kobe Wagyu beef or jamónibérico from Spain, or just a prosaic hamburger or chicken breast, it really is the fat that makes that meat delicious. Plant-based meat companies out there right now use plant oils, things like coconut oil and vegetable oil, which make products greasy, not especially healthy, and often unsustainable.

That's something that we're trying to fix by allowing plant-based meat companies to have really awesome, ethical, safe ingredients that perform just as well as real animal fat. We're doing that using an awesome combination of synthetic biology and computational modeling to invent even new kinds of fat that evolution hasn't come up with yet. We're really pushing the boundaries of food, and are excited to be here with you today to tell you more about what we're doing.

WOLFE: Max, thank you. That's really exciting. Now that we're on a tech run here, I would like for Eric to tell us what he is doing at Matrix Meats.

ERIC JENKUSKY: At Matrix Meats, we design and manufacture three-dimensional nanofiber scaffolds for the cultivation of cells in the cellular agriculture, clean meat, and cultivated meat marketplaces.

WOLFE: Now we're on to Mark Langley. Mark, tell us about yourself in a little bit about UnovisAsset Management.

MARK LANGLEY: Thank you, Teryn, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. I'm a managing partner with Unovis. I source deals, work on deal flow, perform asset market-level analyses, and I'm a bit of a utility infielder for the firm. We look at the trillion-dollar global meat market of industrial animal agriculture as an antiquated and inefficient food production system with a lot of vulnerabilities. We think that fixing that broken system is the most vital economic and ethical imperative of our time.

We started this out with our first fund New Crop Capital where we invest in seed round up to B round investments and have invested in 41 companies on four continents. Now with our second fund, Unovis, we are investing in fewer companies and writing bigger checks, following the same mission.

WOLFE: Fantastic. I'm going to start with the round of questions with you. As one of the lead investors in both plant-based and cultivated meat space, tell us how the sector looks to you from an investment perspective? What do you foresee for the future and how has this shift from plant-based to cultivated meat affected your investment strategy?

LANGLEY: Well, that's a lot to speak to. Let me start with the last part. It has become both harder and easier for us to invest. When we started with New Crop Capital, our first fund, we had to get the industry launched because this was not an investable industry for traditional VCs. It was a sandbox for impact VCs. The companies didn't have a history of operations, they had one or two-year budgets, and no pro forma financial models. There was no ecosystem to support them. There's no established regulatory pathway. There were real scientific challenges to overcome and estimated times to a minimum viable product were 10 years when they would even offer up a timeline.

We knew that the conventional meat industry is broken. We saw that a transition to cultivated meat grown in weeks, not months or years, and without the suffering was an inevitability. We leaned on Good Food Institute's scientists. They have a great scientific team for due diligence. We also went to individual scientists outside of that network for scientific due diligence, and we invested in the most promising startups.

Now, the challenges are for the most part gone, and instead of looking at 10 companies for possible investments, we now have 60-plus cultivated meat companies and another 40 or so support companies out there. We can find multidisciplinary talent to help us with our due diligence. About 40 large life science companies have announced business lines in cultivated meats. We have a lot of companies out there that know how to grow cells outside of an animal.

Unovis is looking at companies that bring unique value propositions that can be leveraged across the entire sector to make everyone more successful and to help them cross what Jeffrey Moore termed the chasm or Valley of Death, where companies transitioned from early adopters to the early majority.

That's how he came to invest in Matrix Meats, which is a picks and shovels investment, as opposed to an investment in a single silver or gold mine. Overall, we have a harder time differentiating between individual companies now, but we have less uncertainty in the sector and shorter time horizons to a minimum viable product at lower barriers as companies move from proof of concept to pilot, to demo, and ultimately in 5 to 10 years to industrial scale.

WOLFE: Thank you for these insights. I think you are playing an incredibly important role, especially to be able to push forward and really make sure that there are exponential changes in science and technology around cultivated meat.

I would like to direct my next question to Frea. Frea, as an expert in cell-based seafood, can you tell us about how cell-based seafood science has developed over the years? Where are we at in terms of scientific and technological advances, and what's the next big breakthrough for cell-based seafood?

MEHTA: I think the first important thing to recognize is that cell-based meats from land animals and cell-based seafood from aquatic species are fundamentally very, very similar. They're sharing the same goals, the same challenges, and celebrating the same breakthroughs.

What those breakthroughs might look like are, for example, growing cell biomass to an unprecedented level, or to feed millions. Or going not only from the growth of individual cells but also to the growth of tissues; currently there is no way to do this. Then scaling all of this production and tough biology in a resource-, cost- and time-efficient way without using animal-derived ingredients.

This is a challenge, and these are goals that are shared across the board, regardless of species. Where cell-based seafood in cell culture and seafood really differ from cell-cultured meat from land animals is actually in the information and resources that are available to us as researchers in those areas.

Most of what we know about cell biology and production comes from mammalian cells, mostly primate or mouse, because those are mammals closely related to us as humans. They have already been established as models for biomedical applications. This presents huge challenges when you're working with cells that have been biomedically neglected like a lot of marine species.

This is also where cell-cultured seafood has huge growth opportunities and huge potential for impacting not only the food worlds, but also biomedicine. We're standing on this foundation of biomedical research and starting to push the envelope and do even more because our application requires it, but in the process of doing so, we're also learning how to culture cells from species that we never were able to do before, or there was never a viable or a critical high-value application that would have allowed for significant public and private funds to push into those areas.

I think really the huge breakthrough for cell cultured seafood is the information that we generate and the gaps that we can fill in the research landscape, which can then be applied not only to food, but also to medical applications again. I think a great story that connects us cross-functionality is maybe the founding of Bluu. We were founded by Dr. Sebastian Rakers who had worked for more than 10 years on establishing fish-cell cultures. That initial need came from disease outbreaks in aquaculture because like any intensive farming practice, a lot of animals in close proximity spreads disease.

Dr. Raker 's work was actually in developing fish-cell lines from species that were heavily represented in aquaculture to study those diseases and develop treatments. Along the way, they discovered some really interesting applications. An example is using fish cells as living bandages to treat burn victims. Of course, we realized, well, okay, we have cells now, why don't we just make those fish directly without even engaging with the animal at all? We've already seen a lot of the entire cultured meat space built on biomedical research. I think there's almost unfathomable impact that can come from starting to include so many diverse new species into our portfolio of biomedically or biologically understood cells and species.

WOLFE: I'd like to move on to Max from Hoxton Farms. Max, Hoxton Farms is really doing interesting work. You cultivate a hybrid product for the cell-based meat industry. Tell us more about this cultivated fat product and how this particular product could really advance the industry.

JAMILLY: When most people think of cell-based or cultivated meat I think they think of two extremes. The first is plant-based meat made entirely with ingredients derived from plants, and the other is cell-based meat made entirely with ingredients grown in cultivators or bioreactors based on cells grown outside animal bodies.

The reality is that our vision of the future of food is somewhere between those two extremes. We think that meat alternatives will be blends or hybrids of some plant-based ingredients and some cell-derived or animal ingredients, and maybe it's no surprise that the hybrid that we see happening and really forming the future of our food system is a combination of plant-based protein with animal-derived fats.

I'll talk a little bit about why we really believe in that version of the future. When it comes to tasty and realistic meat alternatives, what you need is texture, cooking performance, and taste. Typically, in meat, the texture comes from the protein, whether that's cell-based muscle protein or plant-based protein. A little bit of the taste too, but texture in particular. We found that the latest greatest methods for texturizing plant-based protein do a really good job of recreating muscle. What they don't do a good job of is recreating the sizzle, the juiciness, and the taste of fat. That's why we are going all guns blazing for replacing specifically these plant oils with cultivated fat.

There are other kinds of really interesting reasons to be focusing on these plant-based protein and cultivated fat hybrids. One of them is that you need a comparatively small amount of fat to make a really big difference to a product. Typically, the meats that you eat might be 5 or 10% fat by mass, maybe even less, but with no fat at all, they taste vastly different.

Actually, very early, when we were still a company being run out of my and my co-founders' living rooms, we recruited a bunch of our willing and unwilling friends to do a sensory trial. We did some cooking, took existing plant-based food and added very small amounts of traditional animal fat into that food. We found that just a few percent of fat was easily detectable and made that plant-based food way, way tastier.

From a perspective of scale and unit economics, where the cultivated ingredient is at least initially likely to be the more expensive of the ingredients in this blend, it really pays that you only need a small amount to make a difference. And when it comes to comparing cultivated fat to cultivated muscle, fat cells are a lot easier to grow than muscle cells. Fat cells depend a lot less on structure and exercise while they're growing, whereas muscle cells need alignment and stretching forces and are ultimately a lot harder to grow at the kind of scale but will change the world.

The fact that we can use therefore existing bioreactor technologies to scale up the manufacture or production of cultivated fat gives us a lot more freedom to focus on the interesting stuff, which is tweaking the fat to do exciting things. By sizing things, we can make the fat taste differently. We can change its nutritional performance. Maybe we can introduce fatty acids that are normally only found in fish or maybe some algae, which people don't really like to eat, but also we can change the performance of fat as an ingredient.

Plant-based protein is an incredible, exciting world. It spans from 3D printing to high moisture extrusion. Depending on how you make your plant-based meat, you need different kinds of fat with different melting temperatures or densities. By focusing on cultivating fats alone, we can make sure that our fat has exactly the parameters it needs to be a good ingredient.

WOLFE: Fantastic. Thank you, Max. I'd like to hear from Eric. Eric, like Hoxton Farms, Matrix Meats' cellular scaffolding plays a critical role in cell-based meats value chains, and also in making sure that this product is fit for consumer preference compared to slaughtered meat. Where do you see the cell-based meats market going? Which global markets are championing cell-based meats, and what are some of the barriers that you see in current consumer markets?

JENKUSKY: There's four primary ingredients that you need to cultivate meat. You need cell procurement or a cell line that you're going to then input into a bioreactor, utilizing the growth media for the cells to be able to grow. Then in order to provide structure and direction for the cells, if you think of a lattice on the outside of the chimney, where vines grow up the lattice, that's what our scaffolds do. They provide a pathway for the cells to grow across what's considered to be, or what's known as, an extracellular matrix that exists in all living organisms. We replicate that utilizing a process known as electrospinning.

To answer the question, we believe that our product will help enable a number of companies in this space across the world to shorten that curve, to get to market by providing a very important part of the puzzle to allow for the development and growth of structured pieces of meat. And not just structured meat, but also components like minced meat, hamburger or the packaging of sausage, utilizing a version of our product called the microcarrier, which is basically very tiny micronized pieces of our scaffold that cells also are able to grow on.

At present, there's only one jurisdiction in the world where cultivated meat is allowed to be sold. That's Singapore. I think that we'll see additional areas in the world coming on board, maybe places like United Arab Emirates. Then from there, the US, other parts of Asia, Europe, and then eventually the rest of the world will follow suit as we're able to demonstrate that this is an environmentally sound and animal-friendly way to provide for the protein needs of the world.

WOLFE: Our first question from the audience is, what has been the most exciting development in cell-based meat industry in the past five years? Is this a particular innovation, or is this a regulatory announcement, or something else?

JAMILLY: I think that's an exciting question. One of the reasons it's so exciting is it makes me realize what a long time five years is. In the context of the cell-ag industry, five years is about as long as the industry has existed. There were, of course, pioneers like Mark Post. They were doing things in this space back in 2013. But you'd be hard pressed to find a company that is five years old in this space. In the past, say three years, which is really the timescale that this industry has taken off, there have been so many developments, it's hard to choose just one.

I think this all comes down to cost. If we're really going to change the world and make cultivated meat products and meat or seafood at the necessary scale, we need to approach the cost of traditional meat, which is really very cheap. If you watch the cost curve coming down over time, it's astonishing. Each incremental or significant drop in the cost of cultivated meat is due to separate, exciting technical innovation. Culture media has seen many incredible steps forward. But it's hard to name just one.

LANGLEY: I could just chime in on that. I agree with everything Max just said, and I think the most exciting thing that I've seen is the scientific legitimacy of this field. It was first proposed in 1894 when a professor forecast that meat would be manufactured by the year 2000. That was incredibly prescient, but it's been just as little as four years ago that this space was often conflated with plant-based meats. Now, you're seeing real talent coming to this space. You're seeing the large life science corporations enter this space. We're seeing a recognition that this is not a fad. This is truly legitimate, a path forward for feeding 10 billion people by the year 2050.

WOLFE: Fantastic. Frea, Eric, would you guys like to add anything else to that?

MEHTA: Yes, absolutely. I definitely agree with what's been said so far. I think for me a huge highlight was the regulatory approval in Singapore, in addition to the technological advancements that had to occur to reach even the relatively small scale- chicken production that is ongoing there. The ability to walk into a store, or in this case, a restaurant and buy this product, even if it's small scale, even if it's first iteration-that's huge.

From an internal timeline, that's much faster than I would have expected. I think as Max mentioned already, it really highlights how far we've come in such a short period of time, because I think the idea that even in 2021 that this could occur, to me, it didn't seem like it was on the table.

Another thing that I think is huge is a restaurant in Singapore making the decision to switch out all of the chicken on their menu to cell-cultured chicken. This I think is enormous because we often have these questions of consumer acceptance and choice. When consumers have the choice to choose between conventionally raised animal products and cell-cultured animal products, which are they going to choose? I think it's fascinating that this particular restaurant made the decision to eliminate that choice for now and test that consumer acceptance. Whenever you order chicken there for a certain time window, you'll be getting this cell-cultured chicken. I think that's huge because it speaks to the future that we would like to envision for this technology at a large scale.

JENKUSKY: At Matrix Meats, we're actually materials scientists. We're not biologists. What's interesting is that we were able to repurpose our decades-plus experience in regenerative medicine and the biomedical space, and take that knowledge base and expertise and apply it to this new industry. Luckily, a lot of the experiences that we had working with researchers all over the world growing tissue and muscle, we were able to then apply that experience to this. That's why we're excited about being able to help the industry as an enabling technology.

WOLFE: Is it necessary to take a piece of an animal's skin to produce cultivated meat, or can a hair be sufficient? How does this process work specifically?

MEHTA: I think it's a great question actually—where do you actually source these cells from? I think it's highly dependent on what you have access to as a company or as a researcher in the space, and what you're interested in producing. The cells that you get from different parts of the body are going to have different properties that you can leverage in different ways for different applications.

Indeed, the ideal would be the least invasive cell biopsy procedure imaginable. This would be a very small biopsy from something superficial like skin or a follicle of hair. I think there are absolutely sources of cells that exist in the research and industrial space for cell-cultured meat. I think it really is highly dependent and highly variable across the entire space. Theoretically, absolutely a small biopsy from skin tissue or hair follicle is certainly a place where you can get those cells.

WOLFE: Max, what about the fat that you guys are cultivating at Hoxton Farms?

JAMILLY: That was a great answer from Frea, and I don't have a great deal to add, except to say that the same applies to us. We're interested in taking cells in as minimally invasive a way as possible from a biopsy. This allows the animal to carry on running happily around the field.

Most companies in this space are moving towards a version of that production process where they only need to go to an animal once. Not once per batch, or once a year, but once ever. They take stem cells from an animal, which can grow many, many times outside the animal's body. They store those stem cells at very low temperatures. Then you no longer need a huge feedstock of animals—nothing even approaching the scale of traditional animal agriculture to support your process.

The other interesting thing here is the product reflects many of the characteristics of the cells that you started the process with. If you think of your favorite cuts of meat, it has many different kinds of fat. There's the fat that runs through the muscle, there's the fat that sits next to the muscle like in European bacon, and animals have many other kinds of fat besides. This applies to muscles and other tissues too.

Many companies are now thinking about the different options of where we can take these cells from—still in a minimally invasive way—to influence the final characteristics of the products. This is something that Hoxton Farms is thinking about really carefully. It turns out that not all fat cells are created the same, and of course not all domestic breeds of livestock species are created the same either.

WOLFE: Great, thanks, Max. Mark, Unovis Asset Management is leading in the industry in terms of investments. One of our questions from the audience is, are any of the panelists' companies looking to, now or in the future, undertake new funding rounds? If so, have you felt that this particular space in seeking funding has been affected by COVID?

JENKUSKY: I can chime in there. We did our entire seed-stage round in the middle of COVID, all on Zoom. It was literally learning a whole new way to raise money, where in the past there was a lot of travel, a lot of visits, and a lot of face to face. We conducted it all on Zoom and closed it in November. I often joke, I'm not a scientist I only play one on Zoom calls for seed-stage pitches. At any rate, I think that there's still an appetite out there. COVID just changed the way we interacted with potential funding sources, but there's still an appetite, and I'll let Mark talk more to that. There's still an appetite definitely within the VC world for these types of advances.

LANGLEY: I'll have to leave it to the individual companies to speak to their funding needs, because we prefer not to speak for them. These conversations are generally private. I'll just share the industry as a whole is getting a lot more attention now. There's a penthouse overlooking Central Park that sold for $238 million. That's almost twice the money that's been invested in cultivated meats globally before the year 2020. Then in 2020, we saw $370 million invested in these companies. That was a big year and it represented 72% of the total investments ever made in this industry, but that's still tiny when you think of the scope and the scale of the undertaking.

This industry will need tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to produce food that tastes good, that's economical for customers, that's widely available, and is produced at an industrial scale globally. There's no shortage of opportunities and there's a lot of big money that's starting to take a serious look at this now. As I said, it's no longer considered a fad or lab meat; this is considered a very real paradigm shift.

MEHTA: Can I jump in for a moment here? Just because I think this number of $370 million raised last year is incredible and even more incredible as I think the fundraising count for 2021 has already surpassed the funding conferred in 2020, so $377 million at this point. I think whether or not this is correlated in any way to the COVID situation is difficult to say. Absolutely, this is a wild growth period in terms of fundraising.

WOLFE: We have another question here that I think probably a lot of people are asking themselves, so I might as well ask you guys. I recently heard an interview and from 2014 with an expert from the industry saying that cell-based meats would be available in supermarkets around 2030. However, it seems that though the technology cost of production has lowered significantly, that prediction has obviously changed, especially considering what you all are telling us here. What does this group of experts foresee for availability of cell-based meats for mass consumption for the general consumer? Specifically, when are we going to have a cell-based red meat alternative on European supermarkets?

LANGLEY: I'll jump in on the first part of that question. It all depends on what you mean by widely available or mainstream. A.T. Kearney projects that the cultivated meat market will comprise 10% of the meat market in 10 years, and 35% of a $1.8 trillion global wholesale meat market in 2040. I think that's too aggressive. The industry needs large, commercial-scale facilities, and a lot of them, to bring products to cost parity with conventional meat. This industry is nowhere near growing myoblast cells in the 100,000-liter vessels used in the fermentation industry.

Plant-based meats captured about 1% of market share in about 10 years of widespread product development and the R&D challenges were less daunting. I would discount the A.T. Kearney study. CE Delft just came out with a study that was sponsored by GFI (Good Food Institute). One of their scenarios has cultivated meats cost of goods sold getting down to $5.66 per kilogram. That's mainstream, and that's paradigm-shifting. We're anticipating industrial-scale plants by the year 2030, so it's on our near-term horizon. It's tough to put a number on this though. The scientific challenges have generally shifted to engineering challenges, but there's still a lot of engineering challenges out there and that's where I hand off to the technical overachievers that we have on this phone call, because they're better positioned to answer those questions than I am.

WOLFE: Max, Frea? Care to weigh in?

JAMILLY: It seems immodest to jump on after that prelude. I think maybe my answer is not an entirely technical one. Like Mark said, the next few years are going to be very exciting indeed in the European markets, where, if there's any delay from what we've seen in Singapore, it will more likely be regulatory than technical, in any case. I think one of the things that's moving much more quickly than we could ever have predicted is consumer acceptance, and ultimately, people's willingness to try the kinds of products that we're talking about.

Aside from the pandemic's effect, which is probably a positive one on the fundraising environment, it definitely had a boosting effect on people's interest in meat alternatives. People thought a lot more about food security and animal-borne disease. I think in the next three to five years, this continued increase in consumer interest might drive regulatory acceptance and supermarket appearances, even more quickly than we could have predicted now that we have this combined effect of both plant-based meat and cultivated meat.

There are still technical challenges in terms of cost and scale. Those will take time but as we move down the cost curve, probably next up will be a wider distribution in foodservice and restaurants. That might happen before supermarkets in Europe and elsewhere, but we'll get to supermarkets eventually.

WOLFE: Frea, did you want to comment on that as well?

MEHTA: Yes, excellent answers so far, I completely agree. I really appreciate the holistic approach to describing to answering this question rather than throwing out a number. I think that's definitely difficult to know. Yes, I think something also important to remember is that meat right now is quite cheap to buy, but it's not cheap to produce. It's a heavily subsidized industry almost everywhere on earth.

We wouldn't want reduced subsidization for meat—we want food to be accessible to everybody, even if it's not coming from the optimal source—but what would be incredible to see from policy perspective is more support for the cultured meat, research and development and eventually infrastructure. Without this, it's going to be really difficult to make all these technological achievements to achieve cost parity with something that actually costs much more to produce than we consumers realize

WOLFE: Frea, I think that's a really important point that you just made and probably one of the more difficult questions to answer because we're talking about a culture around meat, not just price, and consumer preference. Speaking a little bit to this culture, that's not just, we produce meat, but we have a history behind producing meat. It's a livelihood, it's a culture. People spend generations on their farms. Although we're trying to replace irresponsible practices in an industrial and meat production industry, we also have those stakeholders to consider as well.

How can the cultured meats industry get European and American family farmers on board? What are some of the practical measures that we can use as an industry to help work together? I'll leave this open to all the panelists. I won't leave that question specifically to you Frea, but feel free to answer.

JENKUSKY: I'll chime in. Farming is not going away, number one. Number two, the slaughtered meat industry here in the US, The Cattlemen Associations, et cetera, and every one of us in business, have to learn to continually adapt to changing market conditions. When you do that, and you are innovative and forward-looking, you're able to adapt to the new market conditions. At Matrix, as an example, we manufacture our scaffolds from zein, which is corn protein. Soy is from soybeans. Pea protein is from peas. We still need and want farmers in Europe and farmers all over the planet to be growing these crops.

I think even if you take away environmental concerns, and you take away animal rights, and you looked at the slaughtered meat industry, strictly from a business sense, as if you worked at McKinsey and were asked to design a new way to deliver meat, would it look like the way our slaughtered meat industry is today? I would dare say, you would never design the system that we have today, because it's this multi-century system with compounding issues that were built on top of each other. You would just never ever develop a system like it.

To Frea's point earlier, it's highly subsidized. I think we have an opportunity with cultivated meat to build a truly best-of-breed marketplace where you can deliver products utilizing best-of-breed technologies and that's what's going to help deliver real value and provide the protein needs. It also is fantastic that we do get to positively affect climate change and animal rights. I think this is probably the first time in history where people are actually building systems taking into account those other factors. We didn't in the past. Now, we're finally doing it, and we have the technology to do it. That's really exciting.

LANGLEY: I'll share a story. This is probably apocryphal. There's a story that a president, a US president, who was witnessing one of the first uses of a steam shovel. Someone came up to him and asked him, “What will this do to ditch diggers?” and his response was, “If our objective was full employment of ditch diggers, we'd take away their shovels and give them spoons.”

We're currently producing meat largely the same way we have for the past 10,000 years, only on an industrialized basis. When you move it to more concentrated farms, then you're really exploiting the animals to a greater extent, and creating worse externalities, negative externalities, which are in effect another form of subsidy. These negative externalities are not being paid for by the meat industry.

Having said that, we'd rather have the meat industry principals come on board as allies, not opponents. There are ways to do this. There are efforts underway to transition cattle farmers to hemp farming, chicken farmers into mushroom farmers, and fishermen into seaweed farmers. Those are some really attractive opportunities to transition this industry to better, more sustainable ways of life and means for our planet.

MEHTA: I think there's still that question of what happens to the small family farm. This actually is not being answered in our timeline. This has already been answered. It is the minority of how food is produced globally. If you think of industrialized animal agriculture, it's awful for animals. It's also really exploitative for the people that are involved in it. I think there are opportunities here also for agricultural workers to potentially see some benefits.

WOLFE: All of these points are really interesting, and we're talking about it in an industry that's not only much more sustainable, but we're looking at reversing negative externalities into positive externalities. Considering the environmental damage and climate change risks from animal farming and industrial fishing, what is the potential scalability of cell-based meats to make a measurable impact in terms of environmental protection, mitigating climate risks in our food systems, and also protecting over-fished marine ecosystems?

JAMILLY: I'll give a broad and terrestrial answer, and I'm sure Frea has really interesting points on the marine side of the story as well. What we know is that traditional, intensive animal agriculture contributes some 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, uses about 35% of habitable land and freshwater, and accounts for something like 85% of antibiotic use. We know that antibiotics are linked to antibiotic-resistant disease and also are a source of the vast majority of animal-borne diseases. It's a pretty bad record across the spectrum.

Similarly, the latest lifecycle analyses of cultivated meat suggest that on all of these points, the process will be better. Now, how much better and better in which ways depends on some technology questions that have yet to be answered. It depends on scale, and it also depends on geography, on where the process happens. But there have been several really credible studies. Many of them are driven by the GFI, which Mark mentioned earlier, driving home this point that the environmental credentials of cultivated meat really are better than the industry that exists as it is.

I think one of the things that really sticks with me when we're comparing environmental practice of cultivated meat to traditional meat is the amount of control that we have. If you think of emissions alone, even if the emissions from traditional agriculture and cultivated meat were the same—which they're not—the emissions from traditional agriculture are spread over tens of thousands of hectares across every country of the world.

There's nothing that we can do about them really. We would have to reform an entire industry that, like people have said, is centuries old in order to make a dent in those emissions. On the other hand, any emissions associated with cultivated meat, which although minimal will exist like any scaled-up process, will happen in a focused area at one or several facilities where we can capture it and do a lot more to control the environmental footprint of the inputs in the process as well. It's really better all around.

We have this incredible opportunity to start from the beginning and design and process with climate in mind. We're all food people in this industry and we're doing what we're doing to benefit people and climate. Every process and design consideration that we make is with the climate as a top priority.