Clever marketing and big money have combined to attract some consumers to meat replacements grown in labs. Is mass-market appeal a matter of time or an impossible feat?
SINGAPORE (May 6): On a Wednesday evening in March, hundreds of people showed up at Lau Pa Sat, the food centre in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District, to try a new kind of patty. It is made from plants but claims to closely mimic the taste of beef — it even bleeds. At that evening’s event, San Francisco’s Impossible Foods launched its latest product in Singapore. In the two months since, the plant-based “meat” patty has become available at more than 45 establishments throughout the city.
Social media is abuzz with posts decreeing that it was hard to tell the difference between the fake meat patty and the real thing. The Impossible 2.0 “beef” tastes and smells just like real beef, and its manufacturer says eating it instead of regular beef can save the planet because the production of beef, particularly cattle farming, emits more greenhouse gases and uses more water than plant-based alternatives and takes up vast tracts of land that ought to be returned to the wild.
Impossible Foods is not the only player competing for a slice of the US$1.5 trillion ($2.04 trillion) animal-based protein industry. Its top competitor is Beyond Meat, founded by vegan Ethan Brown in Los Angeles. The company launched its product in Singapore last October. Beyond Meat is listing on Nasdaq at US$25 a share, which would value the company at as much as US$1.46 billion. And, parallel to this plant-based meat industry is a cultured meat one — where genuine meat is grown in labs using stem cells from animals. This industry is still in the early stage, but researchers are looking at growing “chicken”, “fish” and “beef” at a price comparable with their farmed equivalents in the near future.
Humans, it seems, no longer have to rely on farmed meats. And that is good news for a world that international agencies think is bursting at its seams. The global population is set to hit 10 billion by 2050, at which point the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says meat consumption will increase by 73%. That demand cannot be met based on current livestock production systems because the industry already uses 70% of global agricultural land.
Yet, how plausible is it that consumers the world over will give up actual meat for engineered proteins? Is the industry as sustainable as it claims to be? What about food safety?
Rising to the bait
It seems to be going well for Impossible Foods at least, which has grown its restaurant partners by sixfold over the past year. The figure increased from 1,000 in March last year to more than 7,000 today, says Jordan Sadowsky, the company’s director of international launches.
In Singapore, Three Buns Quayside, one of the first restaurants to add Impossible Foods products to its menu in the form of two burgers, says both have been top sellers. “Reception has been really good. People are buying it because they are intrigued and want to try and see if they can tell the difference,” says executive chef Adam Penney. “Even after the hype has died down, people will still go for it.”
Bread Street Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay and CUT by Wolfgang Puck are also reporting positive responses from diners regarding the plant-based patties and say they may add more of such options to their menus.
Little Farms, a boutique grocery store with a health and sustainability focus, has been selling Beyond Meat products since November 2016. Its other meat alternatives include products made by Syndian, Deliciously Ella, Suzy Spoon and Gardein. Co-founder Fred Moujalli says these plant-based options are popular with meat-eaters in their 20s and 30s.
On the lab-grown meat front — also known as cultured meat or clean meat — there are no consumer studies here yet. But a 2016 survey in the US of 673 respondents found that 65% definitely or probably will try it. Of those, a third said they would consume the meat regularly, though only about 15% would pay more for such meat compared with conventional meat.
Still, for fake meat and cultured meat to replace the animal protein consumers are used to is a stretch, says Paul Teng, a professor at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “People are used to eating animal protein and even though plant-based protein has become so much more attractive, to actually compete as a food preference with animal meat, that’s going to require a generational change, and that takes roughly 30 years.”
Nevertheless, new foods such as these plant-based proteins will beef up options available to consumers. Nadiah Ghazalli, consulting analyst on chemicals, materials and food at Frost & Sullivan, says: “These sectors will definitely coexist and complement each other, with the alternative protein market projected to grow considerably in the near future.” Based on current trajectories, she expects to see “enhanced activity in a three- to five-year time frame”.
Another question is whether the new food is as nutritious and sustainable as the companies claim. So far, there are no long-term studies on the impact the new food has on human health, ecosystems and food supply chains. But, agriculture industry groups in Missouri have pressed the state into passing a law banning the use of the term “meat” for food not harvested from livestock or poultry.
The proponents of these meat-replacement products assert that the alternatives are even better than the original. For one, lab-grown meats are just like genuine meat since they are grown from stem cells, says Kelvin Ng, head of strategic innovation at the Bioprocessing Technology Institute under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Plant-based options are even better than lab-grown meats since they are without the cholesterol inherent in meat, according to Ricky Lin, founder of Singapore plant-based meat company Life3 Biotech. He says the food can even be engineered to be good for health, for example by adding ingredients that help reduce cholesterol in consumers.
Natalie Goh, chief dietitian at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, says the amount of protein in plant-based meat compared with real meat is about the same, but the fat and saturated fat content may be higher than minced beef, which consists of 90% lean meat. Juicier burgers are typically made with just 70% to 80% lean meat.
Why not just eat plants then? “You will need to eat a lot of vegetables to meet your protein requirements,” says A*STAR’s Ng.
On the sustainability front, companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have conducted life-cycle assessments, which compare the greenhouse gas emissions and water and electricity use in the entire process of producing these products with those in the production of regular beef.
Impossible Foods says in producing 1kg of its “beef”, it uses 96% less land, and produces 89% less greenhouse gas emissions and 92% less aquatic pollutants. Meanwhile, Beyond Burger uses 99% less water, 93% less land, generates 90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 46% less energy than that needed to produce a regular beef burger.
Plant-based meat is also more sustainable because the industry cuts out the middle process of using crops to feed the livestock. Rather, the crops are immediately turned into “beef” in a production facility that requires less water and space than livestock would require.
Says Kim Stengert, communications director at WWF Singapore: “In meat substitutes, we’re eating the crops we grow instead of feeding them to animals that we later eat, so the environmental footprint will be [smaller].”
Elaine Siu from the Good Food Institute notes: “According to the World Resource Institute, it takes nine calories of corn, soy or wheat to get just one calorie of edible chicken meat. That’s an 800% food waste. Growing that much more food means using that much more land, water, fertiliser, fossil fuels, pesticides and herbicides. It is inherently more efficient and sustainable to produce meat either directly from plants, or growing the cells directly, instead of growing an entire animal.”
Proof of the pudding
Ultimately, the factors holding back the mass adoption and consumption of meat-replacement products are price and taste.
Impossible 2.0, for example, costs Penney from Three Buns Quayside three times as much as regular beef — although, on the plus side, it can keep for longer than beef and is more consistent in terms of taste and quality. Even when Penney makes a smaller profit by pricing the Impossible Burgers at a more palatable rate for consumers, they cost $27 each compared with $17 for a conventional one with comparable ingredients.
Lab-grown meats are even more expensive because they are grown in pharmaceutical-grade nutrient media and placed in bioreactors that simulate the temperature considerations of a live body.
Local start-up Shiok Meats, which was set up in August by scientists Sandhya Sriram and Ka Yi Ling and just recently raised US$4.6 million in seed funding, has produced shrimp meat in that short period of time.
It currently costs Shiok $5,000 to produce 1kg of shrimp meat. The start-up’s founders are researching plant-based nutrient mixes that they can use in place of the pharma-grade ones so as to bring the production cost down to $1 to $5 per kg — comparable with what consumers will pay in the market. Sriram reckons that it will take the company another three to five years, although Shiok expects to launch its products first, in one or two restaurants, by end-2020. That will help it gauge diners’ reception to its lab-grown shrimp.
Indeed, another issue that these companies face is the texture and taste of the meat replacements. Animal meat has blood, muscle and fat. A melt-in-your-mouth beef steak has marbling — intramuscular fat — and is not overcooked so that the meat is still juicy. Lab-grown cells have to be stimulated to grow into the type the scientist is looking for. For scientists to recreate a steak, they would need to grow each cell type separately, then put them together using some kind of protein scaffold to form a slab of beef.
But these are issues that industry watchers believe can be easily overcome. A*STAR is researching alternatives to pharmaceutical-grade nutrient mixes amid the advances in global technology. The first lab-grown burger presented in August 2013 cost US$330,000 to produce. By March 2016, Memphis Meats had unveiled a lab-grown meatball at a cost of US$18,000 a pound. A year later, it had chicken nuggets that cost US$6,000 a pound.
NTU’s Teng says: “Often, the pace of technological change is underestimated by all of us. It is hard to put a timeline on that, but with investment, you can expect breakthroughs very soon.”
And the investments are rolling in. Impossible Foods had received US$506.2 million as at 2018, while Beyond Meat had obtained US$103.9 million and Memphis Meats $19.9 million. Among the investors are meat corporates such as Tyson Foods and Cargill, an indication of where the food industry thinks its future lies.
Still, industry watchers do not expect a complete replacement of livestock meat with plant-based and lab-grown alternatives. While the food industry is innovating with alternative meats, the agriculture industry has not been idle. Says Teng: “The money invested in outdoor farming far outstrips indoor and cellular farming, so I’m expecting to see a lot of progress in outdoor farming.”
Adds Ghazalli: “We expect that fake meats and cultured meats will gradually command a larger slice of the pie as the adoption rate goes up and alternative meats become more popular, but it is likely that both traditional and alternative meats will coexist in the supermarket aisles.”
Finally, there is the socioeconomic aspect to the consumption of these foods. The concept of clean eating is still very much a privileged preference of the First World.
“In low-income parts of the world, there are no viable substitutes for meat that can offer the same caloric value, and complete substitution would actually be detrimental to health. In addition, livestock farming provides income to about one billion people, most of whom are in the lower-income group,” Ghazalli says. “While it is easy to see the positive environmental impact of replacing farmed meat, we also need to ensure the socio-economic impacts, which can be very profound, are mitigated.”
Faux meat gets real for Singapore
Look up cultured meat on the internet and many companies’ websites or articles will show this Winston Churchill quote written in 1931 when he imagined the world 50 years later: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
It is well past 1981 and the technology to make lab-grown meat plentiful and cheap for mass-market consumption has still some way to go. But Singapore is set to accelerate the growth of this research area, led by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and its three-decade expertise in bioprocessing technology.
There are two main roadblocks when it comes to growing an animal, or parts of it, in a lab for food. The first is the cost of doing so. The second is the meat’s cell structure.
The animal cells need a nutrient media to grow in and what is available on the market so far are pharmaceutical grade, which is costly. While scientists can culture the muscle tissue cells of beef by layers, they would also need to come up with a protein scaffold and be able to tell which cells where to grow to eventually resemble, say, a piece of steak with muscle, blood and fat. This is why current meat-replacement products tend to take the form of burger patties or sausages, where the meat is minced, rather than the whole pieces Churchill imagined.
Kelvin Ng, head of A*STAR’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute, says: “Our work involves growing live cells and growing a lot of them and, typically, focusing on therapy purposes — making drugs from live cells.”
The research institute — which already has the necessary tools such as bioreactors as well as the scientific know-how to convert stem cells into various tissues — intends to look into ways to make the production of cultured meat cheaper. It is also researching the use of novel ingredients to enable its products to have a texture that more closely resembles that of genuine meat. Such ingredients can be found from the unused parts of existing crops that are discarded, such as the crushed beans that are thrown out after the carbohydrates used for making noodles are extracted.
This new research focus came about as a result of Singapore’s goal of ensuring food security. The city state aims to ramp up its production of food from 10% to 30% of domestic needs by 2030. The research focus is also a strategy to capture economic value, says Ng. “We need to have an economic perspective in our R&D strategy. Sometimes, it is proactive; sometimes, it is reactive. This is a clear case of proactiveness because the industry is still small, but we’re going to jump in.”
In March, the National Research Foundation announced that $144 million would go into research for what it called a new chapter in the Singapore food story. The money will fund research in urban food production, biotech protein production and food safety science and innovation. These expertise, in turn, are expected to draw companies to set up shop here, creating jobs in Singapore’s nascent agrifood industry. A*STAR and the Singapore Food Agency are also drafting a regulatory framework for cultured meat.
A*STAR is already getting requests from cultured meat companies for collaborative research, although it is tight-lipped on the names of the companies and when the public can expect announcements.
“With venture money, with government support, with regulatory alignment, Singapore is becoming a very holistic ecosystem for these companies to move in. It is becoming clearer and clearer why Singapore is becoming the place for them to set up shop,” says Ng. But, he adds that what is needed are also skills. “There’s no bachelor’s degree in cultured meats or live-cell food production, so we’re borrowing talent from the pharmaceutical and the food-processing industries.”
