Lab-grown meat may never happen. "The Good Food Institute (GFI)'s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the techno-economic analysis, it would produce 10,000 metric tons -- 22 million pounds -- of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the US, according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It's only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the US each year. JBS's Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
"And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI's facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation's meat."
"Using large, 20,000 L reactors would result in a production cost of about $17 per pound of meat, according to the analysis. Relying on smaller, more medium-efficient perfusion reactors would be even pricier, resulting in a final cost of over $23 per pound."
"The final product would be a single-cell slurry, a mix of 30 percent animal cells and 70 percent water, suitable only for ground-meat-style products like burgers and nuggets. With markups being what they are, a $17 pound of ground cultivated meat at the factory quickly becomes $40 at the grocery store -- or a $100 quarter-pounder at a restaurant."
Problems include: requirement for pharmaceutical-grade equipment to prevent contamination, use of fetal bovine serum (FBS), and the cost of pharmaceutical-grade amino acids and other macronutrients.
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
