Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Cultivated meat’s “trough of disillusionment”

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Between 2013 and 2023, cultivated meat companies raised a total of nearly $3 billion. In 2020, Singapore approved the world’s first cultivated meat products, with the U.S. and Israel following close behind.  But head to the meat department of any American grocery store today, and you won’t find cultivated meat for sale. After short-lived restaurant tasting menus in the U.S., it’s no longer available. Distribution in Singapore is growing but small, and no products have launched in Israel yet.  So what happened to the high hopes for cultivated meat? And what comes next for the industry? In this episode, Shayle talks to Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, a non-profit focused on developing research in the industry. She has written blog posts arguing that the industry is in the start-up hype cycle’s “trough of disillusionment.” She calls for focusing on basic research, targeting high-value products, and even adopting a different name — cellular agriculture — to signal a shift toward a broader set of biotech products and techniques. Shayle and Isha cover topics like: What went wrong with the first-generation startups focused on low-value, whole-meat products like beef and chicken Persistent challenges in the industry, like the siloing of expertise, scarcity of research funding, and lack of standardization  Why she’s hopeful about a more diverse second generation that’s focused on high-value products like sashimi and foie gras and biotech ingredients like fetal bovine serum and cell culture media The cellular agriculture cost stack and the $30,000 batch of cookies  Basic research, shared resources, and the standardization needed to bring down costs Recommended resources New Harvest: Where Are We On the Hype Cycle? Part I and Part II The Counter: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. Biotechnology and Bioengineering: Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Hey, it's executive editor Stephen Lacey. Many of you were loyal listeners to a show I created and co-hosted for eight years called The Energy Gang. Well, we're back. Jigger Shaw, Catherine Hamilton, and I are excited to announce our latest project, a weekly news roundtable called Open Circuit. Every week we'll break down how major projects come together, how deals and policies get structured, and what it takes to build critical infrastructure at scale,

all through the lens of current events. You can subscribe to Open Circuit wherever you listen to podcast, or follow it at latitudemedia.com. Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. I'm Shayal Khan, and this is Catalyst. I think before we can even scale and before we can even do the regulatory stuff, we need to create the kind of biological tools of this field. And I know it may sound like, how can all these companies exist

when I'm talking about this very basic stuff? Well, the world is upside down is all I can say. Coming up when and if we might exit the trough of disillusionment for cellular agriculture. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale.

Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability.

Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. I'm Shale Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies and energy impact partners. Welcome.

Okay, so cultivated meat or cellular agriculture. In principle, I love it. It's a climate solution. It's also great for the avoidance of slaughtering animals. These reasons are obvious. But I don't know that much about it. If I'm honest, that's in part because it really just hasn't scaled to reach me as a consumer. I'm guessing that's true of most of you.

So why not? It's been around for a while. So I've been wondering what has held its adoption back. I've had a very loose sense that it's some combination of a regulatory wormhole and incredibly high early costs. and maybe some technical challenges and scaling up. I've also had a very loose sense that cellular agriculture is currently somewhere down in the trough of disillusionment on the classic hype cycle. But honestly, any of those things I just said have mostly been guesses.

All I've really known is that I'm not seeing it out there yet in the wild, so to speak, as a consumer. But I am curious if that will ever change and what would cause it to change. So occasionally this podcast is my opportunity to finally learn about a thing that I've been meaning to read up on. So let's do it. This is cultivated meat or cellular agriculture 101. For this one, I spoke to Isha Dattar. She's the executive director of New Harvest, which is a cellular ag research nonprofit.

She's also the co-founder of two cellular ag companies, Clara Foods and Perfect Day. So she's the right person to talk to about this. Here's Isha. Isha, welcome. Thanks so much for having, Michelle. I'm excited to talk to you about cultivated meat because, or cellular ag. Actually, what is your favorite term for this sector? I assume it's not lab-grown meat.

Well, my favorite term is cellular agriculture because I don't think meat is a sector. That's interesting. Cellular agriculture, but is that a broader category? Does that apply to non-meat stuff as well? Yes, for sure, absolutely. Okay. All right, let's talk about cellular ag then. Okay.

And I want to start with, I guess, having you walk me through a little bit of the history of this sector. Like there has been, there's been a wave of companies that have arrived. I think they have broadly underperformed expectations, at least from a, like, timing perspective. We don't see cellular ag products all over the supermarket aisles yet. So walk me through the history a little bit, and who has been out there? What have they been trying to do? And then like what has happened so far? Sure. I mean, it depends how far back you want to go. I mean, we've seen mentions of growing food. from cells like 100 years ago. Alexis Corell was a researcher who was trying to grow heart tissue in a jar. And then Winston Churchill had a quote about it in the 20s. So it goes way,

way back. But I think the way back you are talking about is more this kind of recent history, especially with the VC-funded companies. And I would say that started around 2014-15, 2014-15. And what happened is we just saw a whole bunch of companies pop up at the same time, all saying we're going to produce meat from cells. And it's almost 10 years later. Wow. It's 10 years later.

These companies, you know, you do see some announcements like little regulatory approvals, tastings here and there. There have been, you know, quote-unquote products in the market, but I wouldn't say it's like in a disruptive way. I don't think it's displacing meat, really. And that first wave of companies from about 2015, 2016, 2016, all came out saying, you know, we're the beef company, we're the pork company, we're the chicken company, which is a little bit funny because it's kind of mimicking the

meat companies that we already know, like this kind of vertically integrated, you know, our business is determined by the animal. But of course, if you're growing meat from cells, you don't have to be stuck to that paradigm anymore. Maybe you're just really great at growing cells, or maybe you're just great at producing media to feed the cells, or maybe you're just great at designing bioreactors. So I think even back then, the disruptive potential was kind of captured in terms of like, oh, this is like the market that we could capture, but it wasn't really realized in terms of this is how the technology actually disrupts how we produce this food. So we saw a second wave

of companies that were more this kind of picks and shovel. companies was the term that I've heard from a lot of companies out there. And they were the ones that like, oh, no, we just work on the cell culture media. We just work on growth factors to feed these cells or we just work on the cells. And I think that helped develop the field a little bit more. A lot of those founders also were a little bit more like coming out of academia. This is a little piece of the puzzle. If we actually think about a world where food is grown from cells, we need a really robust, diverse kind of economy behind it with many different players. And so on. We can't just come out of the gate vertically integrated like the meat industry today.

And yeah, no, it's been interesting because I think that first wave of companies put out some promises that they were going to produce a lot of stuff in a very short period of time, short in the timeline of biotechnology. And, you know, we haven't seen it yet. But I think in the Meanwhile, there is still progress happening, but I think that that big conversation that started about 10 years ago, we're in this kind of trough of disillusionment, as they call it, in the hype cycle terminology, where people are like, what do you mean, this thing will never happen, it's been way too long when actually, it will happen. It's just now we've kind of set ourselves back a little bit, and the funding is not flowing

as much as it used to. Yeah, it's a very common. The hype of, or the, sorry, the hype cycle is, is well-known. for reason. But I do want to see if we can isolate why it hasn't taken off yet. Because I can imagine a bunch of different reasons. I could imagine it's a technical challenge. It's actually just hard to do. I could imagine a scaling challenge. It's easy-ish to do at small scale, hard to do large-scale. I could imagine a cost challenge. It turns out we can produce this stuff at scale. It's just way too expensive. And I could imagine a regulatory challenge. You mentioned little

regulatory announcements, but like it is actually hard, it turns out, to get the stuff licensed. So I'm sure it's some combination, but like how would you rank order the reasons why we've seen a decade of work put into this, but not yet like widespread adoption? Yeah, I think there's one, at least one I can think of right now, upstream challenge of all of those challenges, which is a lot of the technology behind growing meat from cells really comes from the biomedical, pharma medicine world. And we're talking about food. And food and medicine are still extremely siloed when it comes to funding bodies. Like we have the NIH, the USDA. So that's one example. But also in terms of schools, like a lot of land grant universities are doing the ag research.

And it's kind of these like more coastal private schools that are doing the biomedical research. And it's also very separate in terms of just disciplines. Like when you go to do a degree. It's unlikely you're going to do courses in both of those fields at the same time. So when you try to advance an idea like cellular agriculture, even in one lab at one university, it's extremely hard because you don't have the right skills in the right application. You have someone with biomedical fundings like, why would I pursue an ag thing? Like we have so much funding flowing. We don't need to be as cost sensitive with our research. And then someone in ag may not have as much familiarity with the actual cell culture techniques.

So there's kind of that structural problem that's just way upstream of all these other things. If you can solve that problem, which I think New Harvest has contributed a little bit to by funding research that brings those things together, then you get into the problems that you're talking about, which is actually bringing costs down and scale, regulatory, yada, yada, yada. But I would start with technical challenges as a first challenge because I think before we can even scale and before we can even do the regulatory stuff, we need to create the kind of biological tools of this field. So as a parallel example, in medicine, we always hear about research with E. coli or canine kidney cells. There's these kind of standardized cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells that are used all the time to do. to do biomedical research. They're just really well characterized. They perform really well. We don't have those standardized cells in cellular agriculture. So one researcher in the biomedical space can just open up a catalog and say, hey, I need to order this, this, and this. You understand how they

perform and you just get to work on your work. The researchers that we have been supporting have to go to a slaughterhouse, collect cells from an animal, turn them into something workable in the lab. It's just a lot of upstream stuff. So we need to do some standards setting before we can even tackle the technical challenges because we can't ask the technical questions without the research tools. So that's another upstream thing. And I know it may sound like, how can all these companies exist when I'm talking about this very basic stuff? Well, the world is upside down is all I can say. It's actually, it's interesting that you describe it that way. I have a couple of technical colleagues on my team, AAP who have pointed out, I think, a similar dynamic in the carbon removal, engineered carbon

removal world. A hundred percent. Which is like basically there has not, in a bunch of other sectors where you've seen this like incredible scaling effect and cost down trajectory, take solar, take batteries, whatever, there were decades of R&D that occurred before this stage we're in right now where stuff is really scaling. And they pointed out to me that that's not true in some other sectors, engineered C. EDR being an example. And so the risk is, you know, you think you get a bunch of EC-backed companies,

you deploy a bunch of capital into them, and you think, okay, like, now we just got to solve this little technical challenge and scale. And then costs will come down magically as they have in these other sectors. But if there is not a sufficient foundation of science that has been built up over enough time with enough government funding or whatever it might be, maybe you're getting out over your skis a little bit. It sounds like that's kind of what you're describing here. Yeah. And I think with climate tech and a lot of of just new tech in general. It's like the state of science funding. It's the state of how private a lot of even university research is right now, that we have this upside down kind of inefficient

process where it's a lot easier to be a private company raising VC money to do research, which ultimately should just be basic research, because the stuff that's going to be competitive and on the market probably can't happen until that first research happens. So yeah, I've heard that all I've heard that about a lot of things and the more I hear about it, the more I think medicine as we know it is almost like an exception because it has just like

hundreds of years of research and publications and sharing because the kind of public good of medicine is so well understood. And we don't have that same kind of like public good mentality for these other technologies like climate and food, which I think

are just as much mission-driven technologies. Right. So you've mentioned a few times now, I think the appropriate tie to medicine and biopharma and stuff like that, that also carries with it, I think, what seems to be one of the other core challenges here, which is that in the world of pharma, you can afford to spend a lot of money to produce a little bit of stuff because the dollar value per kilogram of material that you're producing at the end of the day is going to be extremely high if you're producing drugs. But if you're trying to produce chicken or something like that, it's going to be orders of magnitude, less value per kilogram. And so I've heard people describe the cost challenge of cellular agriculture as predominantly one where it is taking tools from another sector with a lot higher value capture and then trying to apply them here and getting initially the same result, which is you can produce lab grown, you can produce cellular chicken. breast or whatever it's going to be, but it's going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than market prices. To a first order, is that like the right way to think about the cost challenge? I think that is a way to think about the cost challenge, but another way to think about the cost

challenge is that biopharma has set this precedent that this is what the price of things should be, and they have no incentive to bring the prices down. Cellular agriculture does have an incentive to bring the price down and it must bring the price down. And, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of people are attracted to cellular agriculture for all these kind of different mission reasons, you know, climate reasons, animal welfare, people want to see the end of factory farming. Recently, I've met some people who are into salag just because they think that's the only way that biopharma could become accessible to most of the world is if we bring down the cost in a different place, because biopharma itself will never bring its own cost down.

So, yes, if we're using biopharma mindset to grow chicken, then yes, it will be very expensive. And it's going to be expensive just out of the gate anyway because tech is expensive when you start. But I also think if we're willing to have that same disruptive paradigm shifting mentality that maybe the manufacturer of this looks more like vitamin or food processing or those kind of other. still factories, still produce stuff that you consume, but isn't to the level of biopharma, that we really can bring those costs down substantially. And I'll add, like, the price of chicken is not as stable as we think it's going to be, especially in a climate changed world. We're seeing that with the price of eggs right now with the avian flus. And so, you know,

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how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks instead of engaging journalists or producing content?

Are you wondering why your competitors are getting press and you aren't? Fish Tank PR is an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early stage and established companies. Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible, compelling stories that resonate with the media, Fish Tank can help. Check out fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. Can we talk a little bit more in detail about the cost? So I think, like, okay, so we understand

if you're trying to do biopharma and then just produce cellular ag, it's going to be a lot more expensive. But like, walk me through the cost stack. Say I do want to produce cellular meat, whatever kind, it's going to be. What are the major components of my cost? And what do we know about where the cost lands today to the extent that there is data that's relevant here, just to give us some kind of benchmark for like how steep is the curve? We have to go down. Okay, so pretend I'm a company and I'm going to manufacture cultivated meat. So what I have to do first is build a facility. Well, actually even that has like some asterix beside it because maybe there are existing facilities out there that could be adapted to what I need. I've heard everything from adapting like bioethanol plants to using even vaccine manufacturing facilities that are adaptable.

So anyway, yeah, we can go down those routes. But you want a facility that can grow cells at scale. So that's a controlled facility. Imagine like a brewery. kind of visual of like lots of stainless steel and so on. Controlled environment, not a lot of staff. Like just a, you know, once you get your process up and running and it's not like an R&D process anymore, you know, it's just a factory.

You don't actually need that many staff. So you build that factory. So that's your kind of first capital cost. The second thing and the kind of most ongoing cost is what you actually put into those bioreactors and what you put into the facility. So the media that you're feeding the cells is probably going to be the thing that cost the most. Same like with animals. It's like the feed that's the biggest contributor to the cost of a cow.

So media. So of the things in media, you know, there's a lot of basic, you know, water, amino acids, carbohydrates. The things that are really expensive in media are growth factors. And the paradigm of media right now is fetal bovine serum, which is, you know, as horrible as it sounds. And that's what is used in biomedical research. And this just ties back to my previous point. This is something that no one, everyone knows we don't need to use fetal bovine serum to grow cells. But we do it anyway because it works. No one asks any questions yet, you know, like, in medicine, what does it matter? But for food, we have to get past that. And we are past that.

Like a lot of people, like, you know, people have figured that out. We've had serum-free medias for years. So that actually isn't an issue. But that's an example. of if we were looking at biopharma, that's one thing where people like, hey, what about that thing? No, we don't need that thing if we're looking outside of a biopharma context. So, but like with fetal bovine serum, is the reason you need to get away from that because the whole point is to move away from like an animal-driven industry in cellular ag? Or are you saying it's just expensive? It's both.

In my opinion, if we want this mission-driven technology to be mission-driven, we should get away from the animal expenses and it doesn't make sense for us to still be harvesting cows for fetuses to grow meat without, like it doesn't add up for me. But it also is a very big cost center. So that's true. And then the third reason is fetal bovine serum is like an organic thing. Like fetuses are different. If you've ever done research in the lab, you know that you can only do experiments where you use one batch of fetal bovine serum for your experiment because it's so variant from batch to batch. So that's another reason you'd want to get away from that is if you're trying to do this big standardized manufacturing process, you don't want to be throwing this mixture of random stuff

in your lot. So those are kind of three reasons. And those are also three valid reasons for pharma too. So if we in Salag world were able to kind of shift the standard away from FBS and that was adopted by biopharma, which a lot of people say it is, you know, that would be a win for everyone too. But anyway, I'm a little bit getting off track here. No, no. I mean, actually, before we move on to other portions of cost stack, on CAPEX, okay, so we talk about CAPEX and feedstock. And the CAPEX, I guess I just want an order of magnitude orientation here, right? Is this, if you're going to produce a full commercial scale cell ag factory, is the CAPEX, it's not like battery manufacturing, right? It's big steel,

stainless steel tanks. It's more like biomanufacturing, right? Or is there something in the Cappex that's quite expensive? It is bio manufacturing. Well, you know, there's also different schools of thought if you need like a scale up or a scale out approach. So are you going to have like 10,000 liter, 1,000 liter bioreactor? Or you're going to have one 10,000 liter bioreactor? And I don't know the answer to that question

of which is the better thing to do. Although the people I I listened to a lot seem to think that having, it's somewhere in the middle. Anyway, but yeah, it's fair. I mean, the cost of steel is also kind of expensive, especially these days. But it's also not that different from other food processing equipment. Right. So like a full-scale commercial facility, we're talking tens of millions of dollars, hundreds

of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. Like, what's an order of magnitude? I would say, I would say, tens of. of millions of dollars could make something that's really great right now that would be useful for the whole field. Hundreds of millions, we'd start getting into more like manufacturing in a way that is more than like a couple whole foods carrying product. Right.

Okay. All right. So that's the KAPX side. And then on the media side, you mentioned growth factors are the big driver of cost and also where there's this thing we need to probably move away from for other reasons as well. there's other OPEX. I mean, you mentioned not a lot of people, but what are the other big components of OPEX? Well, so this is a very, very tiny component, so I'm not really answering your question, but we need to, of course, have the cells in there that you're going to be feeding all this stuff too. But if we, you know, live in my ideal world, the sales are some standardized thing that people know how to use and, you know, their license or something, and it's a very low-cost thing. So the cells are part of that.

And then I think the other big cost is the downstream processing. So after you actually grow up a bunch of cells and you harvest the cells, what are the multiple steps you're going to take to turn those cells into your final food product? That could be a huge range of things depending on how clever you are in your process or if you even want to sell a final food product or if you just want to sell this cell mass as an ingredient or something like that. But I will say, you know, the cell mass is going to be. more, you know, quote unquote, processed than like an animal carcass in a sense.

Like you won't have to be removing bones and tissue and that kind of stuff, but there will be some other kind of separation techniques. So yes, to summarize, I think the downstream processing is probably the biggest next cost. And then of course there's kind of energy costs associated with the running the place. Right. Do we have any data points that you think are indicative or valuable at this point as to current production costs? So there's a great paper written by David Humberd on producing cultivated meat, but I don't want to cite numbers from it because it is very much kind of from within the biopharma paradigm.

So it's kind of like if we use the technology that we have today to produce cultivated meat in this context, which of course is kind of higher regulatory, standards and stringent and everything, he thinks that cultivated meat is not economically feasible. And I invite people to read that and kind of unpack that more if they'd like to. I'm not going to dig into those numbers because I don't think there are good apples to apples comparison of where we're actually trying to go with this technology, which is something that is more of like a food processing facility, different scale, and maybe looking at Dave's paper and saying, hey, all these places that are really expensive, that's exactly where science needs

to be applied because it has not been in biopharma. It's not saying it's impossible. It's just saying no one has tried to do this because there's been no incentive to do so before. So you can take that. Maybe I'll give you a number. You can choose if it's useful to you. But a couple of years ago, someone put out this little kind of study where they're like, if I bought all laboratory ingredients to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, how much would

a batch of chocolate chip cookies costs. And so you're buying like, you know, egg powder from Sigma Aldrich and stuff like that. And they cost it out all of the ingredients and it costs $30,000 to bake 30 cookies. So $1,000 per cookie. So let that be kind of the, you know, analogy to cultivated meat is like we're not baking, we're not trying to bake $1,000 cookies. We're trying to bake a regular priced cookie. But we're, you know, using the extremely $1,000 ingredients right now. Okay, so, I mean, my takeaway here is like there aren't great current indicative cost numbers because they probably would be ridiculously high and you don't want to...

Well, or they are low, but they're all happening in the private sector. And so we don't really have access to that information. Kind of circling back to the beginning or that's what happens when innovation happens in these private companies is we're not really elevating the whole few. field all at once. They may have made some great strides in the research, but we don't really know about it. And if numbers are out there, they're kind of marketing, not always published and unverifiable. And so, you know, that's the other challenge. There could be great numbers out there. We just don't have access to them. If you could wave your magic wand and direct, in fact, this may be kind of

what you're doing. But if you could wave a big magic wand and direct like lots of research to driving down costs, where would you be directing it? Is it focusing on the growth factors? Is it focusing on the infrastructure, the equipment, the CAPEX? Is it something else? Like, where do you think is the biggest lever

for cost reduction? We need to build a few shared resources for the whole field. So I would build a shared facility, which is kind of a first pilot facility because what's happening now is the companies are all building their own separate facilities.

there's no standardization. If one works great, if one doesn't work, no one would know why it doesn't work, and then it doesn't prevent the next person from spending their $50 million better on their facility. So I'd create a shared facility, which is kind of more of like an open research place, and it is designed not to manufacture at scale.

It's designed to manufacture at some kind of reasonable pilot scale, but designed to be very tunable. So if something goes weird, the facility itself can be, and the bioreactors themselves can be tuned. Okay, we need to make it warmer, colder, blah, blah, whatever. And I think that shared facility would really generate a lot of data to help a lot of these companies and inform them how they need to be building their stuff. We also need these facilities because with more open research around a shared facility, we can guide the regulatory and safety assessments a little bit more

in a way that kind of opens things up for everybody rather than having whatever company is talking to the regulator right now set a standard for everybody else. That could actually cut off a lot of innovation before it even starts. So I would do a shared facility. I'd also work on a cell bank for the field, basic cells that everybody can use really well standardized, characterized, and that too will be synced to kind of a standardization regulatory conversation

so that whatever cells we decide are like the basic cells for the field are very likely to be approved, if not already approved, by regulators around the world. So we kind of skip that step for everyone. And those are kind of the two first places I'd start. Media, even though that's a big cost center, that is actually kind of like a good place for business right now because you can sell better media, cheaper media ingredients to pharma today. So from my like open research lens, I don't really think that's a place. I mean, it would be nice, but I don't think that's a place that's going to make as much of a difference tomorrow.

You mentioned regulators a couple times. I mean, I should ask, what is the state of regulation around cultivated meat or around cellular agriculture in general? It's a very active conversation. We have seen several, you know, handfuls of products get approved in different regions, you know, one here, one there. I don't always know if the approvals are like the most significant thing. Like, to me, they kind of read like a investor milestone more than a, oh, this is just like the last stop before we blow our product up on the market kind of thing. And we've seen that actually for a few years. I think the first approval was in 2020, you know, which is like five years ago.

And we haven't really seen cultivated meat on the market in a way that any of us can go and get it easily. There is an ongoing kind of international safety conversation happening that FAO is cultivating. And, you know, New Harvest has also been running a lot of safety workshops around cultivated meat and seafood, just getting the private sector together and getting governmental scientists on board and just trying to keep the conversation really live because the last thing we want is for one company to go to regulators and set a precedent for everybody else.

Or actually, that's the second last thing we want. The last thing we want is a product on the market that is unsafe, and then it just holds back this whole idea forever. We talked a little bit at the beginning about the first wave, of companies, that 2014-2015 vintage. My sense is that the newer wave of companies, I guess I've noticed two things that seem different. Tell me if this is right, just on the outside. One is, and it speaks to what they're going after. You said the first wave of companies, right, they were

like verticalized. I'm the chicken company, the beef company, et cetera. I've noticed more companies, one, doing something other than meat, so focused on cellular ag for dairy and stuff like that. But then second, some of them doing the thing that I would have sort of anticipated, which is like the Tesla playbook, start high-end luxury. So go after, right, like something very expensive so that you can be closer to cost competitive sooner. Is that generally true? Like those are two new frontiers of cellular agriculture startups, I guess? Yeah. Well, I will say, you know, the 2014-15 vintage companies, I don't know what they're actually

doing now. Like they came out of the gate saying we're the chicken port. What they're actually doing now, I can't comment on. But I think those newer companies that, you know, they come up with a maybe more specific business plan that does tie to that, okay, we actually do need to come up with something that's a little bit higher cost density product. And they also tie it to some scientific reason why it needs to be that way. So one company is called gourmet and they're making a foie gras. So, oh, that makes sense. You know, even if you don't care about being vegan or something, I think a lot of us will be like, yeah, Fagra is a pretty cruel product to eat.

Right, right. It's both expensive and people are, yeah, like pretty uncomfortable with how we get it. So the mission is kind of there, I think, for most people. And then it's expensive. And then it also turns out that liver cells are like a lot easier to grow than muscle cells. So there's a scientific angle there too that's neat to work with. And then also it's just like this mushy paté stuff. which is what cell culture is like.

You don't have to come up with this really structured stuff. So that's one company that I think is clever. There's another company we really like called Wild Type that is making salmon sashimi. It's just like it looks beautiful. It has those kind of striations like salmon does. And I think what's clever about their product is, you know, fish doesn't have the same. You know, fish is a tragedy of the commons. So there is a little bit more of kind of a mission-driven.

thing there than, you know, ranching or farming, which is like so tied to land and business in a different way than the kind of the commons of the ocean. Salmon, you know, we've talked about salmon and farmed salmon and wild simon for some time. I think people have some familiarity with that. But lastly, like cultivated products, we don't, there's a big scientific process, like food science transformation that happens when you cook something. And cultivated meat, you don't know exactly how it might perform in a pan. You hope it's going to be exactly the same as the cells from an animal, but you don't exactly know.

And so what's clever about having the sashimi is you can really control that product when you hand it over to a consumer. And they're not going to go and cook it in some weird way, which I think happens for a lot of plant-based alternatives is, you know, you're not familiar with, you know, you don't cook this stuff the same way you cook meat or it's not familiar in the kitchen. you can't control the consumer's experience as much. So anyway, the sashimi, I think, is another great example of a clever product that marries the science with a little bit of a higher cost. All right, so just to wrap up, what do you see happening in the sector in the next five years, I guess? Like, paint me an optimistic picture of what it looks like. Why don't I have to paint you an optimistic picture only? No, I am an optimist.

You can paint me a pessimist. Tell me why it's not going to work. No. So I do think we're in a trough of disillusionment. I don't know if we're at the bottom of it or at the just heading into it or where we are in it. But it's an interesting time because it's disillusion from the point of view of a company raising money. But it's not disillusion if you're a researcher. I mean, the research community is actually bigger than ever. There's institutes of cellular agriculture around the world where in 2015 there was zero. There are hundreds of grad students. working on sell ag research around the world where in 2015 there was like two you know like I could count them on one hand um so the field is kind of correcting in this trough I think because we realize you know these companies cannot succeed without basic research food like regular food and meat science is still a science today so we're going to have to have this ongoing science for a long time it's not like you just check a box and say oh this is done now we can do it no this is going to be an

going big thing. Cellular agriculture as a concept is so much bigger than meat. And it's very possible that things like milk proteins or egg proteins or just ingredients in our food are actually going to make a bigger difference for the climate and for nutrition and food and a climate change future and food security than meat. Like meat actually might never happen, you know? And meat is just kind of this like holy grail thought experiment that we love talking about. But it may be some totally different other thing. So we do need to expand our horizons to just growing food from cells. And I hope that we see more and more research in that direction because there's kind of more foundational research to stand on the shoulders of in that direction because we already manufacture

actually a lot of ingredients that way like MSGs made by cells, a lot of vitamins are made by cells, a lot of other food additives. And so I think we're going to see a lot more, you know, We call that precision fermentation, kind of, is like producing ingredients from cells, like the milk and neck proteins. I also think in the next five years better science will happen because the distraction of marketing and comms is decreasing. And so all these little kind of news tidbits about what's going on that really, you know, they sound big when they come out, but did they really make a big difference like some of these

regulatory approvals are going to decrease and you're going to have people that are a little bit more heads down, like thinking about really clever questions that need to be asked. And I actually kind of hope, to your point about optimistic, I actually hope the trough gets a little bit worse so that the companies realize they need to work together and they actually just get over there. We're competing thing and then say, hey, if we actually pool together the little resources that we have, we might be able to help each other get a thing done, and then we can work on our own competitive things in our own separate directions.

So that is my pessimistic, optimistic hope within the next five years is that the companies are actually compelled to collaborate in a way they have never before. Well, as someone who does eat meat, but cannot bring myself to eat foie gras, I do hope that at least that part succeeds because I would love to try foie gras.

also true of a bunch of other things as well. But this is really interesting. I appreciate all the time and insight here. And I look forward to seeing what does come out of this sector when it inevitably emerges from the trough, however deep it is. But thanks, Isha. This is great. Awesome. Thanks so much, Shale. Isha Dattar is the executive director of New Harvest.

This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Pralood backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at Pralud Ventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.