David Humbird's 2021 paper "Scale-up economics for cultured meat"[1] is a pretty damning study of the problems with lab-grown meat. His core conclusion: "Capital- and operating-cost analyses of conceptual cell-mass production facilities indicate economics that would likely preclude the affordability of their products as food."Does anyone know if the problems that Humbird describes have somehow been solved?
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.27848
theptip|3 years ago
Here's the key leap of questionable logic (IMO):
> The capital cost of a conceptual bulk animal cell-culture process is developed from the bare-equipment costs of its most important items. From this purchased equipment cost, a total capital investment (TCI) is obtained through the application of cost escalation factors, which are understood to be rather high for biopharmaceutical cell-culture processes
The idea that at scale, it's going to cost $0.75M for a 1m^3 culturing chamber seems crazy to me. I'd guess these are expensive right now because they are specialist equipment (they are manufactured to the ASME bioprocessing standard, which was created for bioprocessing in a pharma/research context), and when they begin being mass-produced I'd estimate they will come down in cost by two orders of magnitude.
(For context, a ~400gal brewery fermentation vessel made of stainless steel can be purchased for about $5k, made in China. It's about 2x for a "made in USA" vessel. These bioreactor vessels are a bit more complex than the standard jacketed fermenters used by brewers, but eyeballing the schematics they do not seem more complex than a steam-jacketed mash tun, for example.)
At high scale, most of the cost is the bioreactors, the rest of the plant, and buildings. I can't find any real working for the capital costs beyond the bioreactors, but given the extremely pessimistic estimate there, I am skeptical about the broader plant estimates too.
TLDR; if you treat this as a pharma process, you will get pharma prices. If you treat this as a food process like beer (which also has sterility requirements, contamination risks, and clean-room cell line propagation requirements to overcome when manufacturing at scale) then the prices will be much lower. I treat this paper as a pessimistic worst-case scenario, and assume that process innovation will allow substantially lower prices.
The fundamental question is whether food-grade fermentation/culturing processes like those used in beer or yoghurt can suffice; for example it seems to me entirely plausible that we could lower the equipment quality requirements substantially, and still obtain a satisfactory safety profile by discarding contaminated batches. Not a cost-effective option for extremely expensive pharmacological products like vaccines, but potentially viable for simple food products like cultured meat.
uplifter|3 years ago
Analyzing probable cost of fake meat production by comparison with existing cultured food manufacturing is sensible, but fake meat has some differentiating aspects to be accounted for.
A prime difference between these fermentation processes and a hypothetical cultured meat system is that the single cells involved in making beer and yogurt are simpler, much faster breading species than the multicellular lines which develop into complex animal tissue. Another difference is that whereas fermentation involves partial digestion of a portion of the growth medium by the fermenting microbes, creating a volume of artificial meat would require synthesizing cell dense tissue to fill the entire volume. So with artificial meat you need more growth and the growth will be slower, factors which both expand the opportunities for contamination. So preventing contamination will be more important and more challenging with lab meat than with these fermentation products.
I agree with your assessment that the source paper is exceedingly pessimistic about the costs. There is no physical reason why cultured meat production couldn't eventually be cheaper than natural meat production, the hurdles are only technological.
edit: spelling