Farmed Meat Is For Sale, But It’s Expensive. New Study Shows How to Cut Costs
Now that the farmed meat industry has reached the long-awaited milestone of being sold to consumers in the US, much attention will be focused on whether it is possible to make meat without animals in an affordable way. After all, it’s great to cook meat using a process that sounds straight from the pages of a science fiction novel, but most of us can’t afford to eat at restaurants run by some of the world’s most famous chefs.
So how do we go from the world’s most expensive cuts of meat to an affordable price per pound? According to a new techno-economic analysis (TEA) from the bioreactor startup Ark Biotech, using current methods – in other words, with technologies and processes developed primarily by the pharmaceutical industry where drugs can cost thousands of dollars per ounce – we can reach about $29.5 a pound for grown meat. That’s (sort of) progress, but when you consider that’s what you’d pay for a pound of filet mignon at the butcher’s, it’s clear that price per cut isn’t going to cut it.
To navigate from filet mignon prices to something closer to that of ground chuck, Ark outlines four ways to do so in the analysis:
- Reduce media costs
- Improve biomass yield
- Prepare the bioprocess
- Reduce capital expenditure (depreciation), especially with large bioreactors
The TEA breaks down how much each lever currently contributes to the asset generation process:
From there, they analyze how to price-price all four cost instruments:
Reduce Media Costs
Media is the most important expense today. Ark believes that the amount can be reduced by “decreasing the cost of media production (eg, purchase, recipe), and (2) increasing the weight of cells per unit of media (growing more meat in the same amount of media).” They are also exploring other ways to reduce costs in other ways, including media recycling and developing ‘fit-for-purpose recipes’.
Improving Cell Mass
Increasing the cell density and increasing the mass per liter of input is another way to reduce the total cost per pound or, in other words, to improve the overall production yield. Ark’s analysis goes into the technical details of how to do that, including developing cell lines naturally or through genetic modification.
Bioprocess optimization
Another important factor to reduce the total cost of cultured meat is to improve the bio production process, which means choosing the appropriate mode when nutrients are supplied to the cells in the bioreactor. According to Ark, there are four main methods of providing nutrients to bioreactor cells (batch, fed batch, perfusion, and continuous), and the choice of technique involves a trade-off of capital costs compared to the ongoing cost of goods sold.
Large Bioreactors
The biggest capital expenditure in the production of cultured meat is the bioreactor, those large metal vessels that grow the cultured meat. Although large bioreactors have large price tags, the capital cost per unit of cultured meat decreases as production volume increases. Proving that the cost of operating a bioreactor is very fixed, the bottom line is that larger bioreactors mean lower prices per pound of meat produced.
The analysis concludes that in order to reach prices approaching the market value of traditional beef, a combination of improvements (ie, lever adjustment) is needed. Exhibit 1 shows how much progress can contribute to reducing the cost per pound of farmed meat.
It goes without saying that Ark has a great deal of self-will in coming to these conclusions. Still, from what I see, the analysis is a thoughtful and thoughtful assessment of what drives the cost of farmed meat and where the industry needs to go to lower the price per pound.
Of course, they go into more detail in the full report, so I would suggest those interested check it out.
