The growth of plant-based foods is instead largely driven by health concerns. Almost half of consumers are buying veggie burgers because they think it’s better for them, according to a March Datassential report. GFI said there are health benefits to cellular agriculture. Unlike conventional meat, these products will be free of fecal contamination and won’t require antibiotics, thereby not contributing to human antibiotic resistance. But neither of these are the typical health-related drivers, like avoiding saturating fat and cholesterol and losing weight.
Companies could also theoretically combine animal muscle and fat cells to create a healthier nutritional profile, but that’s “an open question at the moment,” according to Matt Ball of GFI. For example, there’s been discussion of making beef without heme iron, a component of meat which some studies found may be linked to cancer.
Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for JUST, a startup that makes both plant-based meat substitutes and cellular agriculture, said his company’s prototypes have nutritional profiles “very similar” to conventionally produced meat. (His company recently raised $220 million.)While cultured meat faces several obstacles, cultured fish may be easier to introduce. Finless Foods co-founder Mike Selden said “clean” fish will have an advantage over the real thing in that it doesn’t contain mercury and plastic. On the other hand, the fatty acid chains that make real fish good for you come from algae consumption. So companies are working on putting that nutrition back into the product.
The future of cultured meat will depend on whether it tastes as good as the real thing, is convenient and has the right price, said Justin Kolbeck and Arye Elfenbein, cofounders of Wild Type, a San Francisco-based cellular agriculture company. Their startup pledges to make “delicious, accessible, and affordable meat and fish,” starting with cultured salmon and trout. The company said it’s also designing a production process that could reduce the risk of food-borne illnesses.
The Datassential report points to one way of increasing consumer interest in these products. Many respondents said they’d be more interested if they knew more about production methods and a lack of health risks. Selden of Finless Foods agreed, saying that the more consumers learn about cellular agriculture, the more accepting they become.
Others aren’t so sure.
“This is a vast unknown,” said Mark Gale, Charleston|Orwig’s chief executive. Companies “shouldn’t assume that just because they might be able to make it, that necessarily, there will be broad adoption.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.