Get Ready For Lab-Grown Meat

the next new thing, lab grown meat. It's made with the cells of cows or chickens or whatever protein you're trying to recreate, and like the name says, it's grown in a lab into meal sized portions. It's still in the early stages, just a handful of companies. There's one in Israel and other in Singapore or some others that are actually selling small quantities. It's expensive, it uses a ton of energy, and the way it's made still requires animals. And then there's a I don't know factor, but has

it taste? Bloomberg podcast producer Ascar Board in London recently had a chance to try some lab grown chicken. Here's what he said. We got this email from a company called eat just, and they said, would you like guys like to come and try our new cultivated chicken. They're a Singapore and company and they invite us us down to this kind of secluded seashore villa. So everything was kind of setting up this really nice atmosphere, felt very like,

you know, high end. And the first course we had was a fried chicken skewa and it was pretty good, much much better than I was expecting. It was really really I would say it's chicken, so it's chicken esque. It kind of looked like tofu. I think the candle light helped so you can see it too too clearly looked a bit like tofu, had the texture roughly of tofu,

but it definitely did taste like chicken ska. We had the skin and then the third piece, which was meant to be like a piece of chicken breast, and it was an actual piece of meat that when you cut into it did actually resemble meat. It looks like chicken and mixed in with rice, which was served with I don't think you'd be able to notice the difference. The only problem is the price, which they wouldn't tell us. So how long until this stuff starts showing up at

your supermarket or your favorite restaurant. My colleagues Dinashankar in New York and Preaan in San Francisco had been reporting on the rise of meat alternatives and tasting a bit of it themselves, And they're here with me now, pre and you know, thanks so much for being here, Thanks for having us, happy to be here. So, just a couple of years ago, plant based meats seemed to be

the really cool thing yet beyond beef impossible burger. They were all competing to get into mcdonaldsenburger King, And lately it's not been going so well. What exactly is happening and why has plant based meat been hitting kind of rough times? Different things out of beyond and impossible, But neither one of them is doing what the founders and I'm sure investors had hoped, which was to just grow

exponentially forever and eventually knocked beef off the plate. That just does not seem to be happening as of yet. The reasons why are I think they come down to a few. One is they just don't taste good enough yet. If you're a meat eater. A lot of meat eaters try these, and a lot of them are are impressed. But not impressed enough to order it regularly as their substitution. They're also still more expensive, so you're not only asking people to maybe trade in something that they don't like

as much, but it also cost more money. So that's a hard ask, especially when prices are going up across the board. And then there's the health question. To Dina right, the health claims that Beyond made were really big. They said that their products were going to help solve heart disease and cancer. They talked about the performance improvements that some of their investor athletes saw from eating their products.

But that's just not really shaking out. And I've spoken to several doctors, including too that Beyond Meat directed me too, and all of them say, listen, this isn't a health food. One of them told me that at least it is healthier than like a red meat burger, but that's not saying much. It's a really low bar. And then another one who's actually done research funded by Beyond Meat and has done a study that looked at them that found improvements in cholesterol and weight, But the doctor who ran

the study said he's still undecided on health benefits. It was one study, and you can't make any kind of big claim with just one study, and I think overall consumers took a closer look, uh and said, this is really processed, and there's a lot of sodium in it, and I don't recognize some of these ingredients, the same kinds of things consumers have been told for years to be on the lookout for as we sort of are

constantly bombarded with health claims from big food companies. I should also add, of course, the beef industry also jumped in on the criticism on the health front. Who were they originally trying to pitch this too? It seems like there's two people. If you're trying to serve the vegan audience, well that would be a pretty palatable alternative to people who want something that's beef like but they're not going

to eat beef. But if you're trying to go after actual beef eaters, it seems like it would be a harder cell. Is that what is happening is that what they're finding so absolutely the target audience for this was me eaters, with the idea that if not a full conversion of your diet, at least meal by meal today instead of having your whopper, you have an impossible whopper. What has been shown, however, is that the most loyal customers, the people that are buying the most per capita, are

the vegans and vegetarians. Now, the flexitarians that are trying to cut down their meat eating also do by these products, but at a lower rate. Now at restaurants. Um, what we've been told is that restaurants often want to have these in stock because they want to have something for

the vegetarian in the group. In the food world, there's something known as a veto vote, and that is the loan vegetarian in the group of five or six people who basically gets the decision making power over where they go to lunch because you look at the menu and you say, we can't go there. There's nothing for me to eat. So restaurants are now being a lot more conscientious about protecting themselves against losing customers that way. So

what are they doing. They're getting these burgers, which are a super easy way for them to keep in stuck. But they're not doing it because they think that the meat eater is going to convert. It's it's for that vegetarian. I think a lot of these companies forget that food is personal, food is cultural, and you can't make these broad proclamations about how you're going to eliminate a certain

category without people feeling some kind of way. And now there's something new rising which is not just plant based meats but sell based meat. You've written quite a bit about this. Can you explain exactly what it is and how they make it? Cell based meat is meat or basically they take the simplest version of as They take animal cells and they grow them in giant tanks in sort of a lab slash factory setting, and the promise is that this is something where animals are not getting

slaughtered once they're raised. Everything's grown in a tank, and then the ideal that these companies have is that it comes out also tasting like real meat. Now, Dina and I can unpack all the different challenges and sort of unknowns in the space too, but that's the whole promise that you end up with a at that is made technically of meat cells and did not involve actually hurting any of the animals. Have you tasted sell based chicken

or beef to even try it? You have to, you know, if you're at upside foods, which is based in Emeryville, California, in the Bay Area. Um I went over there a couple of weeks back. One of their food scientists whipped up a little piece of chicken smaller than size of a playing card and browned it on a pan. He made sure to note for me that it was browning like a normal piece of meat would. Um He had put some oil in the pan, just neutral oil, the

salt and pepper and the meat. Then he eventually added white wine butter sauce into their You know, if you're covering something in a buttery wine sauce, it's going to taste like the sauce, But you can't even get a huge sense of what this thing actually is until it's actually available for people. Did it taste like chicken? It had a light chickenney flavor? Her? What was the texture like? He said, couldn't quite taste because they doctored it up,

But did it feel like chicken? Well, so the company said that that was its filet product, and it was supposed to have sort of fibers the way a piece of chicken has fibers. But to me, the texture more

closely resembled uh kebab. Maybe made out of ground chicken. Um. I cook a lot of food, and I cook a lot of chicken in my own home, and looking at that and tasting it, it did resemble the texture of the ground chicken patties, specifically more than the texture of chicken thigh in my own home or buying a piece of chicken breast. So and I also tried a salmon. The salmon, I have to say, was really impressive. It

was like a piece of salmon sashimi. It's made by wild Type and this is a cell based salm, a cell based salmon um. And it's interesting because actually they use a plant based scaffold, which is the sort of the infrastructure that the cells will cling to to create a food product um. And so some companies are using plant product for that purpose. And it worked really well. I thought it was a very impressive piece of salmon. So that's chicken and salmon. But what about beef? A

lot of people want to know about that. And in December, our colleague Devin Leonard wrote a story for Bloomberg Business Week about and Israeli startup. It's called Olive Farms and they're producing lab grown steak. Devin wants to see their operation and he got a chance to taste it. Here's how he describes it. It does taste like steak. It's very it's very thin, and they haven't really figured out yet how to make thicker steaks, so so it looks like what you you know, I guess what we referred

to are used to refer to those minute steaks. And interesting enough, it had what's it, what looked like blood and I guess it taste of taste like blood, but which it turned out was actually these of ingredients that they used to actually grow you know, the cell growing steaks. And I mean, I mean that's that's the one thing. You know, you bite into it, you're like, okay, you know,

you know this is a steak or something steak. Liked it did feel, you know, feel like I was actually eating steak and you know, and not something that looked like steak. But then but then it felt really different, you know, you know, you know, you know, my stomach. But steakewise, I mean, it tastes fine. Dina and Prea, please stay with me. We'll keep this conversation going after the break. As I understand it, in order to grow

this sub based me. It's a huge industrial operation. Yes, and it's incredibly labor intensive and incredibly energy and intensive. Can you talk about how they actually do it. It's incredibly energy intensive. And the thing is the company is in this space don't currently have the equipment to a scale produce this product. There are right now making samples, some in the very small scale number of pounds per year.

Part of that is because they don't have all the regulatory approvals to be able to sell the product in the first place. But part of it is the science and um. As one investor told us, this isn't necessarily a cupcake recipe that you can say like, Okay, I'm making twelve pounds today to make a hundred pounds or two hundred pounds or thousands of pounds, I just multiply it.

It doesn't really work that way. And so they haven't gotten to the point where they're producing and mass yet, so it's very unclear how that whole thing will work and if they'll ever get there. Dina, I think it's important that we explain to people just some of the ways that these products actually get made. I think it's important for people to know that when these companies talk

about slaughter free meat. It creates this perception that animals are completely far away from what's happening, and that's not necessarily the case. Yeah, So when you grow these cells that have been extracted from an animal, these cells need to be fed right, and they need to know to be growing. And one of the components that are used to grow the cells is often, but not always, something called fetal bovine serum. Fetal bovine serum is really common

in the pharmaceutical industry. It's made from extracting blood from the fetus of a slaughtered cow. Um. So the cow was pregnant when she was slaughtered, and then the fetus has taken out and they take some blood from the fetus to make this fetal bovine serum. Not all companies, but many of the companies use this fetal bovine serum to grow their cells. It's an issue within the industry. Now. Some of them have made not using this central part

of what they do. Others are still using it. Others say they can do without it, but sometimes they use it. So you get kind of different answers about different companies and what they do with it. But sir, only the industry is not at this point at a slaughter free state, so that serum is used in the production of other kinds of cell based meat, not just beef. That's right, fetal bulvine serum can be used to grow any of

the animal cells, whether it's beef, chicken, poor. It's not animal specific to just beef, even though it comes from account. Aside from the ethical issues involved in the fetal bovine serum, there just isn't enough of it. That product exists for the pharmaceutical industry at this point. And so if the cell based industry wanted to, you know, become like a substantial source of meat for humanity, if they were using fetal bovine serum, they'd need a lot more than is available.

And that's actually true of everything else that they feed the cells, the amino acids, the sugars, the whatever. Um. There just isn't enough of any of it. The companies in this space don't necessarily talk about it as openly as you would assume if this is so paradoxical to the ultimate goal. But that is one thing that people should know that there's a skull out there to get away from that. But there's still some of it happening

to help grow the cells. The importance of fetal bovine serum to this industry is I think an open question, because you do have companies like Believer Meats that have said they don't use that they never used it, it's not important to them. Um. You also have a company like eat Just which says they don't need it. They've developed a process to go without it, but the product that they're selling in Singapore still uses it because that

is all they have approval for from the government. So every company has its own answer on this question um as to how important fetal bovine serum is to them, And I think that how important it is to the industry is right now, it's unknown. We don't really know. So how far away do you think we are before we start to see cell based chicken, cell based beef, you know, or I'm at the grocery store. Years, at

least at the supermarket, definitely years. I don't think it's implausible that basically as soon as one of the company's goes through all the regulatory steps and gets the clearance to sell, I think immediately on that at that point we will see that company put some product in a very small number of restaurants is my guess as to how this will roll out. It will be very small, supermarket, mass commercial. They haven't even shown that they can even

do that. They don't have the materials to do that. But they can make small amounts. And the company eat Just, for example, is selling small amounts of its chicken in Singapore, and both eat Just and Upside have told me essentially that they're ready or they'll be ready when they get the go ahead from the US government. When Dina says restaurants, this isn't like McDonald's or Burger King or somewhere where these cell based meat products are going to be available

to the masses. Upside has a partnership with Dominique Krenn, a chef and San Francisco. Her restaurants very very high end and pricey, and Domini kren has said she'll use their chicken product in her restaurant once it's available, and she can. That's actually also though how impossible. First scot its foothold was it launched in Momofukunihi with David chang Um and that got them a lot of headlines, name recognition.

It meant that like look a real very highly respected chef who loves meat is willing to sell our burger. So I think it's actually a super smart marketing play when you have very little product to sell it through, like your best ambassador, which in food is going to be a high end chef. We'll be right back where we saw say impossible and beyond those are reasonably faced and people still aren't flocking toward it because they don't like the product itself as much as the people who

made it thought they would. I suppose something like cell based meat would have to have buy in from vegetarians and vegans. How have they responded to the idea of cell grown meat, especially because as you describe it actually involves, you know, animal cells. I think that really comes down to the individuals. It's hard to say. Eat Just, which does have its product in Singapore in some areas for limited sale, says on its website that like, this is

not a vegetarian product. There are animal cells involved in this. But again, I think it goes back to how someone might define being vegetarian for themselves. Some people who are vegetarian eat eggs, some people don't, for example. And the other thing is this is not available commercially in the US are really in much of the world. Even in Singapore, the sales are very limited of these cell based meat products. I will also say as far as vegan sagittarians, it

also depends on what their motivation is. You have a lot of I think young people that are making dietary changes because of their concerns about climate and this industry promises that their products will be better. Now, as it turns out that has yet to be proven that they will be less environmentally impactful product than the real thing.

With the exception of beef. If you're not eating meat because you're concerned, or you're eating less meat because you're concerned about the environment, then this is likely going to get your interest. But if you take a closer look at the environmental credentials, you might say, I'm not persuaded. What about how healthy this is? Is it healthier than beef?

Is it healthier than chicken? When it comes to saturated fats and other sorts of things that people are trying to cut down, I don't think we can know that until the company's release a product to the public that includes nutrition facts. Who are the investors in these press who's seeing the future? Are traditional meat industry companies looking at this as a future and trying to get on or are they trying to protect against it. Well, it's

an interesting assortment of investors. You've got like the celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio as an investor. He also invested in Beyond Meat. You've got the Whole Foods former CEO John Mackie. You've got the Singaporean government which has a venture arm which has backed a number of these companies and they do a lot in the food and food security space. And the meat companies have gotten involved to Tyson as an investor and Upside from when it was known as Memphis Meets.

There are more than a hundred companies in the cell based meat space that have gotten funding over the last couple of years. But I mean there are some much larger players like Upside and Eat just you know, being the first to launch in Singapore, but there are a lot of smaller companies in this space. And the thing is they're just not all going to make it through this economy. They're not all going to continue getting funding.

Maybe in the slush fund years of one they were able to get some money and ride the high of investor excitement around this really idealistic vision of eliminating the slaughtering process from meat, but especially with the plant based meat slowing down already, in some concern around whether or not cell based meat will actually when it. When it does one day get past all the hurdles of getting them raw materials, getting the technology to scale, making products, etcetera,

will people even accepted. I think a lot of investors will be scared off and there will be a culling of the companies over the next couple of years. I mean, I guess that a question about whether people will accept it is an interesting one because you know, a lot of people eat meat, and they've made peace with the idea that you're slaughtering an animal to provide meat, and yet there's that reaction of kind of like do cell based meat where that somehow seems like a step too far,

whereas traditional meat isn't. Do you think there's gonna be a big barrier to get people to want to eat it? I mean, I think it's just going to depend on different populations of people. I was actually surprised. I asked my niece who's she's fifteen. I asked her if she would eat it and she was like, yeah, I think she caveated with as long as it's kosher because she's like a good Jewish girl. But um so, I think young people are much more open to it than older generations.

But what we found with the plant based meat, and I think what we've always known about meat in general in this country is that it's really emotional. Food is emotional generally, and meat is really emotional. There's a lot tied up in meat choices, and so how this is perceived and what the consumer acceptances we'll have to wait and see. But um, I wouldn't think it's just going

to be an easy bait and switch. And the other thing is some of these products are going to be sort of blends when they're released to consumers ultimately in stores, Like when when they get to that point, they're not even going to mostly be like here is of cell based chicken thigh equivalent. They're going to be mixtures that have plant based products and some of the cell based

meat product to create nuggets and things like that. And when we're already seeing a slowdown in that space, um, I think it's a valid question to wonder how people will feel about that, and then again, you're getting into the question of, well, are people moving further away or are people trying to move further away from processed food? And what just crosses me into different people prea Anan Dina Shanker, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Thank you, thanks for having us. You can read more of ENA's and prey As reporting on Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Read today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg

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