The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

UPSIDE Foods bites into $400M round to serve cultivated meat later this year

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

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Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

There are several reasons as to why, one being science, but a more important reason is that the growth medium needed to feed the cells can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars per liter. Some companies are working to reduce this cost and provide the infrastructure to help scale, but as with anything that needs to be built, it may take years.

Let’s go back to UPSIDE Foods: In 2021, the company opened a 53,000-square-foot engineering, production and innovation center in Emeryville, California. It was supposed to initially make over 50,000 pounds of finished product and eventually scale to over 400,000 pounds per year.

Buoyed by $400 million in fresh capital announced in April 2022, UPSIDE had intentions of getting its food to market later that year. However, as WSJ noted in its most recent story, “UPSIDE’s pilot plant isn’t yet operating at the 50,000-pound annual capacity the company announced when it opened in 2021, according to company executives, much less its future target of 400,000 pounds. Production can accelerate once UPSIDE receives USDA clearance, company executives said.”

While some companies are really having fun making cultured-meat products, there are still more challenges to solve and regulatory approvals that have to be in place for a more widespread adoption. The U.S. government is working on it, as are others.

Cultured meat firm resurrects woolly mammoth in lab-grown meatball

The U.K. made a bold statement this month by investing £12 million into a new research center for the development of cultivated meat, which is said to be the government’s largest investment into this industry to date.

However, the U.K.’s announcement followed the Italian government putting forth a bill that would ban cultivated meat. Clearly there won’t be a single path forward, and cultural connotations with food will play a role in regulation.

Investors also seem to be accepting that their involvement in cultivated meat is going to require taking a long bet.

Friederike Grosse-Holz, a director at Blue Horizon, told TechCrunch+ in 2022 that cultivated meat is “a little like a moonshot” now, but felt that would change with price parity, adding that even that goal would take a decade or so to reach.

“This is not a revolution, it is a transformation, and it is going to take time,” Grosse-Holz said at the time. “Food is tied to emotion, and if it feels like you have to change your food, it will be hard. But if you can change your mind around the way we make food, what a climate-friendly diet will look like and the ethics around animal farming, this may be a way where you don’t have to give up the indulgence around the barbecue, but can do something better for the planet, animals and humankind.”

If you have a juicy tip or lead about happenings in the venture and food tech worlds, you can reach Christine Hall at chall.techcrunch@gmail.com or Signal at 832-862-1051. Anonymity requests will be respected.

Is cell-cultured meat ready for prime time?