When Mosa Meat served up a first-of-its-kind, lab-grown hamburger in 2013, it cost over $300,000. Eleven years later, around 200 startups worldwide remain hopeful that growing meat from cells, rather than slaughtering animals, will one day be a major portion of our food supply. Despite their optimism, such success is not a given.
In 2024, the industry has hit such rocky times that multiple startups have been forced to scale back or close shop. The industry is talking about eventually producing about 30 million pounds of finished product annually. However, over 100 billion pounds of traditional meat is produced annually today.
And if plant-based meat accounts for about 1% of all meat by volume, it’s going to take time for cultivated meat to get to that point, said Better Meat CEO Paul Shapiro, who wrote a book in 2018 called “Clean Meat.” Any goal that puts cultivated meat in big box grocery stores or on fast food menus in the 2020s is “unrealistic,” he told TechCrunch. “Even if it were ready now, and the funding was available now, the time that it takes to build these factories is years.
And the fact is, the money isn’t there for it, which is why a lot of these companies have abandoned their plans for commercial-scale factories,” Shapiro said. For instance, New Age Eats shut down in early 2023, with founder Brian Spears posting on LinkedIn that the company was unable to secure funds to complete its pilot facility. Berkeley-based Upside Foods laid off workers a.