Wall Street The magazine ran under the cover of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultured or cell-grown meat, and the inner struggle.
The magazine focused specifically on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding the process of making farmed chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to get that approval. This was followed by Eat Just, which was selling its products in Singapore, the first country to approve the sale of cultured meat, and received “approval” from the Food and Drug Administration in March.
The WSJ story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success in making small batches of the chicken product, as well as its lack of the ability to produce large quantities of the product at low cost, or even at price parity with conventional meat – and to be fair, most cultured meat companies struggle With this too.
“At first our chicken will be sold at a premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we expand, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our ultimate goal is to be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”
Companies in this sector manufacture meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. However, the production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story are nothing new. “Is cell-grown meat ready at peak times?” It wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question that was asked in early 2022 that has yet to be answered.
Most of the farmed meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how difficult it is for companies to mass produce and create foods in such a way that the end product is less than $10 a pound.