the street wall Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultured or cell-grown meat, and the infighting.
The Journal focused particularly on what is happening at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the US Food and Drug Administration regarding its process for making cultured chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and becoming 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 cultured meat, Followinggaining its FDA approval in March.
The WSJ story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success in manufacturing small batches of its chicken product, as well as its inability to produce large quantities of product at low cost, or even at price parity with the traditional meat, and be fair and cultured meat companies struggle with this as well.
“Initially, our chicken will be sold at a premium price,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale up, we hope to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is ultimately to be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”
Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells fed with growth factors. However, the production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story are not new. “Is cell-cultured meat ready for prime time?was not just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that has yet to be answered.
Most of the cultured meat stories in our archives include at least one sentence about how difficult it is for companies to mass-produce and create food using this method so that the final product costs less than $10 a pound.
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