The revolution that died on the way to the table

It's a stunning vision of a world beyond the present: a world where MEAT is plentiful and affordable, with little impact on the environment. Forgotten about the slaughter of animals. Global warming has been contained. At the center of the concept is a high-tech factory, where steel tanks as tall as apartment buildings are housed and finished steaks roll off conveyor belts, millions of pounds a day—enough to, astonishingly, feed an entire nation.

Kill-free meat is the main promise of what is called "cultured" meat. This is not a new plant-based alternative. At least in theory, it's a few animal cells grown with essential nutrients and hormones, processed using sophisticated technology, and voila: juicy burgers, friedtuna and marinated lamb chops without a hint of existential angst.

This is a vision of hedonism - but also of altruism. A way to conserve water, free up vast swaths of land, dramatically reduce warming emissions, protect vulnerable species. This is a loophole to escape from the excess growth of humanity. All we need to do is tie a napkin.

Between 2016 and 2022, investors poured nearly $3 billion into cultured meat and seafood companies. Powerful venture capital and sovereign wealth funds - SoftBank, Temasek, Qatar Investment Authority - wanted to get involved. So are major meat industry players such as Tyson, Cargill andJBS , and celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. The top two companies are Eat Just and Upside Foods, both startups that have reportedly reached billion-dollar valuations. And today, several products containing cultured cells are approved for sale in Singapore, the United States and Israel.

However, despite almost a decade of work and many messianic claims, it is becoming increasingly clear that a widespread revolution in cultured meat has never been a realistic prospect, and certainly not in the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe.

Interviews with nearly 60 investors and industry insiders, including many who worked for the companies or were on their executive teams, reveal wasted resources, broken promises and unsupported science. The founders, shackled by their own unrealistic claims, avoided sensitive topics such as the use of ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, caught up in the excitement of the moment, wrote check after check, despite significant technological obstacles. Costs were out of control as startup targets came and went. At the same time, no one could achieve a result close to a significant scale. Yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to achieve the impossible, creating the illusion of an exciting race to market.

Now, with venture capital drying up across all industries and the sector's disappointing performance becoming increasingly visible, the reckoning will be difficult for many to survive.

Investors will undoubtedly want to find out what went wrong. For others, the more pressing question is why anyone thought things could go right in the first place. Why have so many people bought into the dream that cultured meat will save us?

The answer is not just related to a new type of food product. For all its terrifying speed of onset, climate change is an invitation to rethink the economy, consumption, relationships with nature and each other. Cultured meat was an excuse for shirking this hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was rooted in nostalgia, a way of pretending that things would continue as they were, that nothing needed to change. It was magical climate thinking, a delicious delusion.

Josh Tetrick was an executive at vegan food company Hampton Creek when he first came up with the idea of ​​growing meat in a lab. A former first-division footballer who exuded a brash, magnetic self-confidence, he was a regular at conferences where he could be seen boasting about his high-profile investors and their desire for “extraordinary results.”

Mr. Tetrick has been an animal rights activist since high school. He said he founded Hampton Creek in part to save farm animals from short, cruel lives as flesh-and-blood cogs in a global supply chain. He also spoke movingly about how by switching to vegan foods, we can reverse the greenhouse effect , the water crisis and the destruction of ecosystems caused by animal agriculture.

Getting predators to change their eating habits is no easy task. Despite the destructive effects of meat, we continue to eat it in large quantities, a behavior Mr. Tetrick likened to addiction. But while in law school, he read about something that piqued his interest: NASA-funded scientists were trying to grow meat (in this case, goldfish meat) in a laboratory.

The idea only gained traction in 2013, when Dutch scientist Mark Post announced that he had created the world's first cultured beef burger. The single patty, which was painstakingly grown fiber by fiber in hundreds of plastic containers, cost more than $300,000 to produce . It was impractical, but powerful: Soon meat startups were raising money , making bold claims, and setting aggressive product timelines.

The most basic part of the process - turning a few living cells into many - is not new. This is what pharmaceutical companies have been doing for decades to create vaccines. The influx of oxygen and rich soup of amino acids and sugars mimic the conditions that cells experience in the human body, and added hormones encourage cells to divide and multiply.

This is an expensive process, but usually produces only "cellular sludge", a viscous mass. To turn it into something edible (or marketable), you need to add plant matter such aspeas and soybeans to create a sort of plant-animal hybrid. Or you could try something much more complicated: getting animal cells to form into muscle tissue.

Making all this accessible and in large volumes is a problem that no one has solved even today. That didn't stop Uma Valeti, founder and CEO of the company now known as Upside Foods, from declaring in 2016 that humanity is on the verge of a "second domestication," a shift in diet as significant as the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. and livestock farming. “We believe that in 20 years, most of the meat sold in stores will be cultured,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “In a few years, we plan to sell fully lab-grown pork, beef and chicken with increased protein content,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. Inc. Magazine described him as a cardiologist who is "betting his lab-grown meat startup can solve the global food crisis."

Mr. Tetrick decided to join in the hype. It was a good time to break new ground: That same year, BLOOMBERG conducted a damning investigation that found that Hampton Creek, now called Eat Just, was sending people to buy jars of its vegan mayonnaise to create the impression of increased consumer demand. (Eat Just claims that this program served partly for quality control purposes.) Bloomberg also reported that Mr. Tetrick became romantically involved with a subordinate, that Eat Just grossly overestimated its impact on sustainability and that one executive, influential Silicon Valley investor-philanthropist Ali Partovi, accused the company of defrauding investors. In 2017, all members of the board of directors, except Mr. Tetrik, resigned.

That December, I visited Eat Just's headquarters in San Francisco to try a sample of Just Egg, a plant-based egg replacer that the company still sells today. To my surprise, I was also shown sketches of what a cultured meat factory might look like. I'm told that such a factory could one day produce enough farmed protein to feed the entire United States—a fraction the size of the average animal farm, but much more efficient. In just 15 days, a droplet of cells can grow millions of pounds of meat. The book "Clean Meat" describes how Mr. Tetrick, looking at the factory plans, said: "By 2025, we will build the first such factory," and by 2030, "we will become the world's largest meat company."

However, problems grew more and more. The company was developing duck products such as foie gras and chorizo ​​when scientists tested the cells used in 2018 - and found mouse cells. This was not the result of poor hygiene: the source of contamination was laboratory materials, not live pests. But Eat Just had to abandon its entire line of cages, and eventually abandon its duck products altogether. The incident highlighted some of the many challenges associated with the transition from growing cells in academic research to commercial food production. Recently, the company told me that the infection was an isolated incident, and “once we realized that an infection had occurred, we did not transmit anything to anyone.”

Such failures did not slow down the development of the industry. Over the next year alone, at least 20 new cultured meat companies announced they were entering an already crowded market. Bruce Friedrich, president of the nonprofit Good Food Institute, shouted from the podium that investment firms, tech incubators and meat companies were all getting into the game, calling cultured meat a "huge investment opportunity." RethinkX, a think tank dedicated to the adoption of new technologies, has gone even further. “By 2030, demand for beef products will fall by 70 percent,” one company document said. “Before we reach that point, the American livestock industry will be effectively bankrupt.” And further: “Other markets for livestock products, such as chicken, pork andfish will develop along a similar trajectory.”

"We're bringing down the cost and improving the taste, and I think it's going to be meat in the near future," Mr. Tetrick said at the Good Food Institute's annual convention. “And it’s very unlikely that there will be another option.”
George Peppow, chief executive of Australian company Vow, which had been farming meat for several months at the time, was in the audience. I remember sitting there and thinking, "Wow, this is amazing," he says. “These companies are already ready. It’s like it’s already happening.”

Something was happening, but what exactly? In 2019, as all of these companies were trying to find viable routes to market, scientists working at the company that would become Upside conducted genetic tests on a high-throughput chicken cell culture line. To their horror, they, too, discovered contamination of laboratory cells, but in this case it was a rodent even less pleasant than a mouse: a rat.

In its email, Upside said the contaminated cell line was never "intended for our commercial process or pipeline" and that it was an isolated incident that helped the company improve its quality control measures.

In January 2020, the company announced it had raised $161 million in a public offering round, marking the largest publicly disclosed investment for a cultured meat company.

Steve Molino is a DIRECTOR of Clear Current Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on sustainable food, and an early backer of BlueNalu (cell-grown bluefin tuna, $118.3 million raised). He's no stranger to making big bets with limited information, but he's still been amazed at how money is pouring into the industry. “There were no real numbers based on which you could say: “Wait a minute, this either won’t work or, if it does work, it will take a very long time. “Without that data,” he says, “someone might give you a tiny sample of something and you'll be like, 'Wow! This is the future."

Josh Tetrick remembers being in Boulder, Colorado, on Thanksgiving Day 2020, calling his team endlessly to get updates from Singapore, where Eat Just was seeking its first government approval. “I lie down and put my phone away for a while so I can stop checking it all the time,” he told me. “I fell asleep on the floor. And I woke up to a call from the HEAD of the regulatory department, who said: “Josh, we got it.”

Eat Just's cultured meat division could only produce small quantities of chicken, and at great financial loss. The process still used fetal cow serum, a product of the cruel animal supply chain that cultured meat was supposed to make obsolete. The product, according to the company, was 30 percent plant-based and was a cross between a chicken nugget and a veggie burger. Despite this, the resolution was hailed as a landmark event. “No-kill, lab-grown meat will go on sale for the first time,” The Guardian wrote, calling it “a landmark moment for the meat industry.”

Between 2020 and 2021, investment in the industry increased by more than 300%. Shiok Meats, which started out as a seafood producer, managed to raise $30 million without even having a cell line capable of providing sufficient culture growth, a key requirement for success. New Age Eats, which makes cultured sausages made from just 1 to 2 percent animal cells, received $32 million and began construction of a 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Alameda, California. The plant was an example of what an article published in the journal Nature Food called "Potemkin pilot sites."

Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds government and academic research into cultured meat, says she watched the whole thing in disbelief, knowing that the fundamental scientific problems had not yet been solved. “This,” she recalls telling her company’s board of directors, “is a bubble that’s about to burst.”

In November 2021, Upside opened its plant in Emeryville, California. “This is no longer a dream,” Mr. Valeti told a cheering crowd of employees during a ribbon-cutting ceremony that the company streamed on YouTube. The Emeryville plant was designed with big, shiny reactors in part to produce whole chicken breasts, the company says. However, as Matt Reynolds and I recently reported, Upside is preparing its chickencutlets almost by hand in minuscule quantities using single-use plastic bottles - a cumbersome, unscalable and unsustainable process that seems to produce more plastic waste than meat. Upside recently told me that the chicken cutlet operation was never about scaling: "Its goal—and it has achieved it—is to inspire North Star consumers to explore the possibilities of cultured meat."
As for Eat Just, in May 2022 its cultured meat division, Good Meat , announced plans to build two plants in Singapore and the United States. The American factory will be a mega-plant with 10 250,000-liter bioreactors, capable of producing millions of pounds of meat, according to Eat Just. But projected costs spiraled while the startup's funding plummeted.

“I was surprised,” Mr. Tetrick told me, “how quickly the funding markets closed.” He says one of the biggest backers of cell-based meat companies told him he'd be better off switching to real estate investing .

Last year, ABEC, a construction company that was a key partner in building the projects, sued Eat Just and its cultured meat division, seeking about $100 million in unpaid invoices and payments for changes in scope of work. (The counterclaims allege that ABEC, among other things, failed to supply purchased equipment.) Another company also filed a lawsuit for millions in unpaid bills.

After so many years of plenty - but with no product in stores - it seemed it was finally time to pay the bills.

Last month, I visited Eat Just's headquarters in Alameda and the first thing I noticed was Mr. Josh Tetrick, sitting in a darkened glass-walled conference room on a Zoom call with a complex spreadsheet flashed on a projector screen. Eat Just laid off at least 80 staff in 2023, and at the time of my visit the company was in the process of downsizing, moving from two buildings to one.

The confident charm that Mr. Tetrick exuded before is more subdued today; he now exudes the strong-willed stoicism of a firefighter, with occasional flashes of frustration and sadness.

“Unfortunately, the outlook that matters to us is very long-term,” he told me. “You have to look not just at the next 10 years, but at the next 50 years.” The goal is not to build a huge plant, he added. “The goal is to make it more likely that this will happen over decades—I can hardly pronounce decades,” he said. “I’m choking on these words.”
Mr Tetrick said he hoped Eat Just, which still sells plant-based products such as the Just Egg, would break even this year. But the man who once spoke so optimistically about the revolution told me:

 “I don’t know if we, the market, will have enough time to figure it out in our lifetime.” And he laughed tightly. “People who invest in our company don’t want to talk about lifetime terms.”
The truth, Mr. Tetrick says, is that the economics of raising meat won't work for anyone until factories cost a fraction of what they cost now, and he doesn't know how to solve that problem.

To describe the emotional power of this realization, Mr. Tetrick repeatedly paraphrased Mike Tyson's line about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face.

Other companies could face the same brutal blow when they try to scale up in earnest, he said. Most of them simply don't know about it yet.

Mr. Tetrick's competitor, Upside Foods, also has no product in stores, but said it was optimistic about its prospects. The company has "made significant progress" in new product development and manufacturing processes and is now focused on developing soil-fed chicken, which will be produced for the first time in a 187,000-square-foot plant located north of Chicago.

I tried several times to speak with Uma Valeti, Upside's executive director, but his representative refused. In response to my detailed questions, the company responded with the following: 

“As with any transformative technology, our path and plan to scale has evolved as we innovate and strive to do what has never been done before.” , against the backdrop of a constantly changing and unpredictable external and economic environment. Innovation does not follow a straight and continuous line. The assumption that our path is unusual ignores the reality of the development of transformative technologies and violates the interests of every innovator who dares to bring something new to the world.”
Of course, it is true that innovation is rarely linear. When developing any new technology, failures should be expected. There is also progress, and recently it has been quite noticeable.

Researchers at Tufts University have managed to obtain cow cells to produce a protein that previously had to be purchased at great expense. And Upside and Eat Just, among others, have figured out how to make nutrient broth cheaper without using fetal cow serum. Some observers say such incremental improvements could one day make luxury cultured meat available in niche markets at higher profit margins or improve plant-based meat offerings. It is possible that the research will lead to breakthroughs in other areas. “I'm sure something positive will come out of this, but I'm not sure it will be meat,” says Isabelle Decitre, founder of ID Capital, an investment firm specializing in food technology. However, some see the industry as a growing threat. Bills have recently been introduced in Florida and Arizona to ban the sale of cell-based meat. Other states may follow.

But as understandable as the cultured meat market's uneven trajectory may be, there is one peculiarity to it: the market and, in particular, its two largest players, Upside Foods and Eat Just, built expensive facilities and won government approval without overcoming the most fundamental technological problems. .

Last month, at the Cellular Agriculture Summit at Tufts University, biotech expert Dave Humberd noted that the industry is "wishful thinking" about market readiness he's never seen. His prediction for the future of cultured meat: “Research and development will return to academia. And this is probably for the best.”

His extensive research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, demonstrated that the cost of producing cultured meat "would likely preclude its use in food."

Several industry veterans I spoke with were even more negative. Joel Stone is a consultant specializing in industrial biotechnology. I asked him how likely it was that within my lifetime at least 10 percent of the meat produced in the United States would be cultured.

“If I wanted to bet on it, the chances would be zero,” he said categorically.
During my recent visit to the Eat Just office, I finally got the chance to try this product. In the test kitchen, chefs brought out one large piece of cultured chicken on a sparkling white plate. They cut it into six pieces, served four for me with mushrooms and broccolini on top of a lovely lavender-colored puree, and kept two for themselves and Carrie Kabat, Eat Just's director of communications, who hosted me. It seemed like it was a special occasion for them to try it. “It cost $10,000,” one chef joked.

The chicken was flavorful, with a mild umami flavor, but the sensation was closer to that of tofu or seitan than chicken, which makes sense since it's high in plant protein. This dish will never satisfy a die-hard meat eater, which was, after all, the goal. So what is all this effort for?

We are in the midst of a slow-motion global catastrophe. Every year, the destructive force of climate change becomes more destabilizing, and the harm humans inflict on animals becomes more extreme. But the changes in society that are necessary to prevent the worst consequences are also irresistible. It's so tempting to cling to recent memories of a less chaotic past.

Cultured meat was the embodiment of the desire to change everything without changing anything. We won't have to reconsider our relationship with Big Macs and bacon. We could continue to believe that the world will always be as we know it.

Cultured meat was also a tantalizing extension of a deep American fantasy: that we could buy our way to a better world. In a world where indulging our desires usually comes at the expense of others - or at the expense of something else - this was a product that redefined consumption as a virtue. And for investors, this was confirmation that it is possible to make money and do good at the same time.

Lastly, it was an expression of our faith in technology and visionaries with a cool prototype, a slide presentation and just the right amount of natural charm.

Framed this way, cultured meat has always seemed like a story of optimism. She talked about how people came together and solved big problems in the shortest possible time. It was about the limitless potential of human ingenuity, our ability to make the impossible possible.

But the more time I spent inside this market, the more I became convinced that at the heart of the whole project was desperation, a recognition that real change, political change, was impossible, so we might as well tell people to buy the shiny new product.

To my surprise, Mr. Tetrick saw something similar in this. “The reason we do cultured meat is because of my pessimism about the ability of people to collectively make a difference,” he told me in a phone conversation. “I think the addiction to meat runs so deep in us.”

Later, when we spoke in person, I asked him what he thought about the $3 billion that investors had poured into cultured meat. Could this money make the world a better place if it were used in a different direction? Mr. Tetrick placed his hands on his knees, imitating two runners. The runner on the right, he says, is grassroots advocacy, political propaganda, nutrition education, farm policy, fair labor conditions, animal welfare . The runner on the left is cultured meat. If he had $3 billion, he wondered, what would be better for creating the world he said he wanted to see in the first place?

He chose the first runner.

For a short time, it was as if he had emerged from a long-term sleep. But before I could ask him how he could continue to run the company, he answered my question himself. The fact is, he says, there are unlikely to be people who will give the first runner $3 billion. Even if this is the best strategy, the world works differently.

“People are much more motivated to invest in something that can make them a profit than to sacrifice,” he said. "I think it's unfortunate, but that's the reality."

Forget about our diet for a minute. What needs to be done to change this attitude? We think of technology as fast and bottom-up change as slow. But the irony is that sometimes new technologies cannot be born without a lot of unsexy collaboration. Without new rules and bold political actions. No difficult cultural discussions. Without real and sometimes uncomfortable changes.

This article was produced in collaboration with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Author: Joe Fassler