Betting on the Next Harvest: Why Agtech’s Moment May Finally Have Arrived
For the first time, agricultural innovation may align with both the economics of venture capital and the urgency of supply disruption
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For the first time, agricultural innovation may align with both the economics of venture capital and the urgency of supply disruption
Exiting a company is a milestone—but for mission-driven founders, it’s also a chance to rethink how they create change.
In just four years, leading companies in the cultured meat sector have driven core production costs dramatically below what the Humbird TEA—and its surrounding media coverage—deemed possible.
Microalgae, those tiny organisms that thrive in water and sunlight, hold immense potential for addressing the world’s protein sustainability challenges. By tackling key cultivation bottlenecks and exploring alternative growth strategies such as mixotrophy, microalgae-based proteins may soon become more accessible to consumers, offering a valuable addition to our diets and food supply chains.
By taking the tools of tissue engineering and adapting them to work on a scale as large as agriculture, cell-cultured meat could change the world. But first, we need political will to fund foundational academic research in this field.
The general assumption is that technology is intrinsically neutral — it can be used for either good or bad and the outcome depends on the person or group who uses it. However, history has shown us time and again that this is not entirely true.
Chitin- and chitosan-based scaffolds show promise for improving both the scalability and nutritional value of cell-cultured meat products.
What options are on the food-tech menu for achieving long-term protein security? Cell culture, plants, microorganisms, algae, and fungi may all have roles to play. But from a sustainability and resilience perspective, is there a clear winner?
Gene-recombinant biotechnologies aim to produce key animal proteins at a fraction of the cost of conventional animal husbandry. The implications for research, medicine, food systems, and the climate could be huge. But can these emergent technologies scale quickly enough to spur system-wide change?
Seaweed is the collective noun for a group of at least 10,000 species of macroalgae, and new species are being discovered each year. Although seaweeds have been consumed for millennia, they’re increasingly (and rightly) viewed as a hero ingredient. With only half a dozen species cultivated at scale right now, seaweed’s potential for the alt-protein industry is only just starting to unfold.
Every now and again a young person comes along whose intellect and wisdom seem to defy their age. Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of working closely with one such individual. If you haven’t yet heard of her, you probably soon will. Meet cellular agriculture’s rising star, Avery Parkinson.
Much attention has been given to the innovators producing plant- and cell-based alternatives to traditionally animal-based foods, but less recognized are the ones developing serums and mixes in which those proteins can grow. Some of the most creative are using ancient and simple components—including algae and mycelia—to make the foundations for animal protein alternatives.
Japan is forging a unique development path for cellular agriculture — one in which no one is left behind and anyone interested can get involved in helping create an open, inclusive future for the technology. This is the story of the Shojinmeat Project and how a citizen science experiment came to have big impact on national policy.
Brave New Meat podcast host Doug Grant talks with Michael Aucoin, CEO of alternative protein investment firm Eat Beyond Global Holdings. As a publicly traded stock on the Canadian Securities Exchange, Eat Beyond (CSE: EATS) is currently one of the only options available offering retail investors early exposure to emerging alt protein startups and technologies.
“Many other industries use a linear model — take, make, use, and dispose — which is clearly unsustainable. Once a supply chain is established,” says New Harvest Research Fellow Dawne Skinner, “it is essentially locked in because it is too costly to reconfigure. Given that the cell-based industry is nascent, we are in the stage of initiating a new supply chain. My research aims to figure out how we can start this supply chain off on the right foot.”
Though opportunity in this space is abundant, government regulators have not yet caught up to the pace of new product innovation. Given the significant implications that new regulations and guidance can have for the alternative protein industry, it is important to ensure that the end results are inclusive and comprehensive.
Rarely do retail investors have the opportunity to gain exposure and access to a new technology this early. That’s partly because Agronomics — which bills itself as “a thematic investment play into the clean meat sector” — is one of the only publicly traded options available to those who see the potential in cultivated meat.
Though perhaps not thought of as immediately as startup magnets like Silicon Valley, Singapore, or Israel, it would be a mistake to overlook the innovation culture of Canada — the outlook for cellular agriculture there is highly optimistic.
Although antibiotics are generally thought of in the context of treating infections within our healthcare systems, that’s not where most are actually used. Globally, around 73% of all antibiotics are used in animals grown for food.
What distinguishes a muscle cell from a fat cell or a skin cell? The answer is “gene expression.” Although genome sequencing and analysis has been employed vastly in the study of disease and pharmaceuticals, there has been little application in the emerging field of cellular agriculture.
How do you feed 10 billion people? The university that helped turn California’s wine industry from afterthought into economic juggernaut has set its sights on cultivated meat.
There is no shortage of intelligent and passionate people who want to get involved in cellular agriculture, but there are few resources directing them to the various pathways into the field. In order to solve this problem, Cellular Agriculture Australia has developed an online resource called “Pathways into Cellular Agriculture.”
Over the next two years, many cultivated meat startups will bring products to market leading to acquisitions and IPOs as the industry matures. Looking toward this future, it’s worth considering how valuable these companies could be.
UK-based startup CellulaREvolution has announced new funding to accelerate development of their technology which promises to solve key scalability challenges in cell-based meat production.
Investor and author Jim Mellon talks one-on-one with Doug Grant, host of the Brave New Meat podcast, to discuss his new book, Moo’s Law, and the investment opportunity in cultivated meat.
The confluence of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the rapid development of new food technologies and the rising global demand for protein mean that we are on the cusp of a huge and profitable investment wave into new forms of agriculture. The greatest beneficiaries of this investment wave will be cultured and plant-based foods.
What I’ve learned through my first eleven Brave New Meat podcast interviews with founders and investors in the cultivated meat industry
Cultivated ground meat has the potential to unravel the business model of the beef industry.
An aquaculture researcher from the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) has secured a seed grant from US-based research institute New Harvest to develop cell-based crayfish meat.
Three late-stage PhD candidates have been accepted into a government-funded industry internship program to undertake cultivated meat research.
By optimizing culture media ingredients specifically for cultivated meat production, and by producing those ingredients at scale, costs may be reduced to as little as $0.24 per liter. This would enable cell-cultured meat produced in bioreactors to reach prices competitive with their animal-based counterparts. But investment and demand needed to reach those economies of scale remain a constraint on lowering cultivated meat production costs.
Cultured insect meat products might look more like normal burgers and steaks than you’d expect. But what is entomoculture, why might we need it, how does it work, and who’s leading the research? Prodigious young science writer and New Harvest summer intern, Avery Parkinson, answers all your questions.
As global demand for protein grows steadily, our sources of animal protein must diversify to keep up. And Australia is well placed to become an international powerhouse for an emerging research field that could transform the way we produce and eat meat: cellular agriculture.
A recently founded startup from Australia has developed a novel edible scaffold for cultivated meat production, addressing one of the key challenges facing the cellular agriculture industry. Perth-based Cass Materials has harnessed the natural fermentation processes discovered in the production of nata de coco — a coconut jelly commonly used in desserts in the Philippines — to manufacture a nanocellulose fiber matrix within which meat cells can adhere and grow.
In 2040, one third of the meat on our plates could be grown outside of animals, drastically reducing the leading sources of CO2 emissions and water pollution, while answering the question of how to feed a global population of nine billion. Cellular agriculture companies such as Memphis Meats, BlueNalu, and Mosa Meat are racing to bring their products to market, but they are still missing a key ingredient: affordable culture media available in large quantities. Brussels-based startup Tiamat Sciences believes their technology platform could become the best option to bridge that gap.
On December 29, 2017, just two days before New Year’s Eve, Josh Tetrick, the CEO of JUST, and his golden retriever, Elie, boarded a nonstop KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight in San Francisco that would take him halfway around the world to Amsterdam, where he hoped to make the first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat. This article is an excerpt from BILLION DOLLAR BURGER: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy, with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Chase Purdy.
While most grocery stores now stock a seemingly endless variety of dairy alternatives derived from nuts, seeds, or grains, what most consumers don’t yet know is that a new kind of real milk—created not by cows but scientists—will likely be joining them on the shelves very soon.
It’s a sick and tragic sight. Across the US, dairy producers are currently dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk into fields and lagoons, as demand continues to plummet. It makes me think about the country’s more than 9 million dairy cows, forced to live out their highly unnatural lives, in dark, cramped milk-making prisons, often sick and in pain — just to keep pumping out a useless commodity. The same could be said of the US meat industry, which slaughters 9.59 billion land animals a year. To make matters worse, President Trump ordered slaughterhouses to stay open despite the clear danger to public health. This is something we can fix.
In an eponymous book published in 1968, Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich noted that the rate of population growth would outpace agricultural production, leading to widespread famine and subsequent suffering in the 1970s and 1980s. Many now look back at that prediction and shame it as another example of fear-mongering about a Malthusian catastrophe that has been often repeated throughout history but never come to pass. This post comes from my upcoming book, Cultivated Abundance, which will be published by New Degree Press in July 2020.