After a period of relative quiet, the cultivated-meat industry is waking up again but for the wrong reasons.
Recent months have seen businesses close down, with Dutch company Meatable and Israel-founded Believer Meats throwing in the towel less than ten years since fruition.
Yet it’s a natural transformation process for companies to fail and not unexpected for a nascent tech and cash-intensive industry in transition, similar to what we have seen in plant-based proteins and controlled indoor agriculture.
What is different with cultivated meat – or lab-grown, cell-cultured proteins – is most players have not yet commercialised their products, in most cases hindered by regulatory approvals, which are governed on a product-by-product, and country-specific basis.
The initial hype around…
After a period of relative quiet, the cultivated-meat industry is waking up again but for the wrong reasons.
Recent months have seen businesses close down, with Dutch company Meatable and Israel-founded Believer Meats throwing in the towel less than ten years since fruition.
Yet it’s a natural transformation process for companies to fail and not unexpected for a nascent tech and cash-intensive industry in transition, similar to what we have seen in plant-based proteins and controlled indoor agriculture.
What is different with cultivated meat – or lab-grown, cell-cultured proteins – is most players have not yet commercialised their products, in most cases hindered by regulatory approvals, which are governed on a product-by-product, and country-specific basis.
The initial hype around cultivated meat and the vast sums of investor money thrown at the sector have both dissipated but that’s not to say the long-term potential, and interest, in the category has disappeared, too. It’s still there but with a recalibration around future expectations and what will unfold.
Perceptions remain, however, that cultivated meat is dead in the water, an observation that is likely to be amplified by the consolidation process many predict will now ensue. Those left will also face the ultimate challenge of scaling to generate decent revenues and profitability, made all the more difficult by AI being the choice destination of investor cash.
And the on-shelf price points will have to be competitive, if not cheaper than, field-reared meat – an aspect that can only come with scale – or else consumers are unlikely to switch on a repeat basis.
Even before the recent business failures, Mark Lynch, a partner at London-based consultancy Oghma Partners, had predicted a consolidation phase for cultivated meat more than two years ago, estimating at the time that £2.6bn ($3.1bn) had been invested in the sector since 2016.
Fast-forward to the present and Lynch says: “The valuation hype has been deflated and it’s quite difficult to get that excitement back again. Investors are going to be extremely wary of these businesses which aren’t commercial.
“It’s difficult getting people to fund start-ups anyway but, in a sector that has been around for a while and hasn’t really delivered anything, it’s even more difficult. It’s where the trend of investment is as well and the trend is clearly in other areas and not in cultivated meat.”
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Agronomics is an investor that got burnt by the demise of Meatable but is still invested in Israel-based SuperMeat and the Dutch business Mosa Meat, both early moves in the category. Demonstrative of the prevailing interest, Mosa Meat secured €15m ($18m) in additional funding at the tail end of last year.