Startup to Serve Up Chicken Strips Cultivated From Cells in Lab
Startup to Serve Up Chicken Strips Cultivated From Cells
in Lab
‘Clean meat’ developers say it avoids towering costs of
feeding, caring for livestock; Tyson takes note
By JACOB BUNGE Updated March 15, 2017 8:43 a.m. ET
A Bay Area food-technology startup says it has
successfully developed the world’s first chicken strip grown from
self-reproducing cells without so much as ruffling a feather.
And it pretty much tastes like chicken, according to
people who were offered samples Tuesday in San Francisco, before a planned big
reveal on Wednesday by Memphis Meats Inc.
Scientists, startups and animal-welfare activists believe
the new product could help to revolutionize the roughly $200 billion U.S. meat
industry. Their goal: Replace billions of cattle, hogs and chickens with animal
meat they say can be grown more efficiently and humanely in stainless steel
bioreactor tanks.
Startups including Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat, based in
the Netherlands, have been pursuing the concept. They call it “clean meat,” a
spin on “clean energy,” and they argue the technique would help the food
industry avoid the costs of grain, water and waste-disposal associated with
livestock. Scientists from those companies have already produced beef, grown
from bovine cells and made into a burger and a meatball. Until now, chicken
hasn’t been produced using the method.
Big meat companies have taken notice. Tyson Foods Inc.,
the largest U.S. meat company by sales, launched a venture-capital fund in
December that it says could invest in meat grown cell-by-cell. Kevin Myers,
head of product development for Hormel Foods Corp., last fall called the
startups’ research into the cultured-meat technology “a good long-term
proposition.”
On Tuesday, Memphis Meats invited a handful of
taste-testers to a San Francisco kitchen and cooked and served their chicken
strip, along with a piece of duck prepared à l’orange style.
Some who sampled the strip—breaded, deep fried and
spongier than a whole chicken breast—said it nearly nailed the flavor of the
traditional variety. Their verdict: They would eat it again.
Uma Valeti, Memphis Meats’ co-founder and chief
executive, said the cell-culture poultry luncheon represented a technological
leap, and opened up an important market. “Chicken is the most popular protein
in our country,” he said.
U.S. consumers ate an average of 90.9 pounds of chicken
apiece in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is nearly
as much as beef and pork combined.
World-wide, about 61 billion chickens are raised for meat
annually. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has projected that
chicken—relatively cheap to produce and with few religious and cultural
barriers—will soar past pork as the world’s most-consumed meat by 2020.
Duck is relevant for a different reason. China, which
tops the list in global consumption, consumes 2.7 million metric tons of duck
meat annually, nearly 10 times the next-largest consumer, France, according to
data from the International Poultry Council. The average Chinese consumer eats
4.5 pounds a year.
The cell-cultured meat startups are a long way from
replacing the meat industry’s global network of hatcheries, chicken barns, feed
mills and processing plants. But they say they’re making progress. Memphis
Meats estimates its current technology can yield 1 pound of chicken meat for
less than $9,000. That is half of what it cost the company to produce its beef
meatball about a year ago.
The startups, however, aspire to produce meat that can be
cost-competitive with the conventionally raised kind. Boneless chicken breast
costs an average $3.22 per pound in U.S. grocery stores, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Memphis Meats, whose investors include venture-capital
firms SOSV and New Crop Capital, hopes to begin selling its meat commercially
by 2021. They already have met with skepticism from livestock groups, who
remain confident that carnivores will continue to seek out farm-raised meat.
But the startups have won fans among animal-welfare
advocates, including those that typically oppose all meat consumption. Ingrid
Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has said her
group was “very much in favor of anything that reduces or eliminates the
slaughterhouse,” and PETA helped fund some early research.
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