Technology MGT 325

Sources of Innovation  The Rise of “Clean Meat”

In late 2017, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a group of other high-powered  investors—who comprise Breakthrough Energy Ventures, such as Amazon’s  Jeff Bezos, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Virgin’s Richard Branson—announced their  intention to fund a San Francisco–based start-up called Memphis Meats with  an unusual business plan: it grew “clean” meat using stem cells, eliminating the  need to breed or slaughter animals. The company had already produced beef,  chicken, and duck, all grown from cells.b  There were many potential advantages of growing meat without animals. First,  growth in the demand for meat was skyrocketing due to both population growth  and development. When developing countries become wealthier, they increase  their meat consumption. While humanity’s population had doubled since 1960,  consumption of animal products had risen fivefold and was still increasing. Many  scientists and economists had begun to warn of an impending “meat crisis.” Even  though plant protein substitutes like soy and pea protein had gained enthusiastic followings, the rate of animal protein consumption had continued to rise. This  suggested that meat shortages were inevitable unless radically more efficient  methods of production were developed.  Large-scale production of animals also had a massively negative effect on  the environment. The worldwide production of cattle, for example, resulted  in a larger emissions of greenhouse gases than the collective effect of the  world’s automobiles. Animal production is also extremely water intensive: To  produce each chicken sold in a supermarket, for example, requires more than  1000 gallons of water, and each egg requires 50 gallons. Each gallon of cow’s  milk required 900 gallons of water. A study by Oxford University indicated that  meat grown from cells would produce up to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas  emissions, use 45 percent less energy, 99 percent less land, and 96 percent  less water.c  Scientists also agreed that producing animals for consumption was simply  inefficient. Estimates suggested, for example, that it required roughly 23 calories worth of inputs to produce one calorie of beef. “Clean” meat promised to  bring that ratio down to three calories of inputs to produce a calorie of beef—  more than seven times greater efficiency. “Clean” meat also would not contain antibiotics, steroids, or bacteria such as E. coli—it was literally “cleaner,” and that  translated into both greater human health and lower perishability.

The Development of Clean Meat

In 2004, Jason Matheny, a 29-year-old recent graduate from the John Hopkins  Public Health program decided to try to tackle the problems with production of  animals for food. Though Matheny was a vegetarian himself, he realized that  convincing enough people to adopt a plant-based diet to slow down the meat  crisis was unlikely. As he noted, “You can spend your time trying to get people  to turn their lights out more often, or you can invent a more efficient light bulb  that uses far less energy even if you leave it on. What we need is an enormously  more efficient way to get meat.”d  Matheny founded a nonprofit organization called New Harvest that would be  dedicated to promoting research into growing real meat without animals. He  soon discovered that a Dutch scientist, Willem van Eelen was exploring how to  culture meat from animal cells. Van Eelen had been awarded the first patent on  a cultured meat production method in 1999. However, the eccentric scientist  had not had much luck in attracting funding to his project, nor in scaling up his  production. Matheny decided that with a little prodding, the Dutch government  might be persuaded to make a serious investment in the development of meatculturing methods. He managed to get a meeting with the Netherland’s minister  of agriculture where he made his case. Matheny’s efforts paid off: The Dutch  government agreed to invest two million euros in exploring methods of creating  cultured meat at three different universities.  By 2005, clean meat was starting to gather attention. The journal Tissue Engineering published an article entitled “In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” and  in the same year, the New York Times profiled clean meat in its annual “Ideas  of the Year.” However, while governments and universities were willing to invest  in the basic science of creating methods of producing clean meat, they did not  have the capabilities and assets needed to bring it to commercial scale. Matheny  knew that to make clean meat a mainstream reality, he would need to attract the  interest of large agribusiness firms.  Matheny’s initial talks with agribusiness firms did not go well. Though meat  producers were open to the idea conceptually, they worried that consumers  would balk at clean meat and perceive it as unnatural. Matheny found this criticism frustrating; after all, flying in airplanes, using air conditioning, or eating meat  pumped full of steroids to accelerate its growth were also unnatural.  Progress was slow. Matheny took a job at the Intelligence Advanced Research  Projects Activity (IARPA) of the U.S. Federal Government while continuing to run  New Harvest on the side. Fortunately, others were also starting to realize the  urgency of developing alternative meat production methods.

Enter Sergey Brin of Google

In 2009, the foundation of Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, contacted Matheny  to learn more about cultured meat technologies. Matheny referred Brin’s foundation to Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University, one of the leading scientists  funded by the Dutch government’s clean meat investment. Post had succeeded  in growing mouse muscles in vitro and was certain his process could be replicated with the muscles of cows, poultry, and more. As he stated, “It was so clear  to me that we could do this. The science was there. All we needed was funding to actually prove it, and now here was a chance to get what was needed.”e  It took more than a year to work out the details, but in 2011, Brin offered Post  roughly three quarters of a million dollars to prove his process by making two  cultured beef burgers, and Post’s team set about meeting the challenge.  In early 2013, the moment of truth arrived: Post and his team had enough cultured beef to do a taste test. They fried up a small burger and split it into thirds  to taste. It tasted like meat. Their burger was 100 percent skeletal muscle and  they knew that for commercial production they would need to add fat and connective tissue to more closely replicate the texture of beef, but those would  be easy problems to solve after passing this milestone. The press responded  enthusiastically, and the Washington Post ran an article headlined, “Could a TestTube Burger Save the Planet?

Going Commercial

In 2015, Uma Valeti, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic founded his own culturedmeat research lab at the University of Minnesota. “I’d read about the inefficiency of meat-eating compared to a vegetarian diet, but what bothered me  more than the wastefulness was the sheer scale of suffering of the animals.”g  As a heart doctor, Valeti also believed that getting people to eat less meat  could improve human health: “I knew that poor diets and the unhealthy fats  and refined carbs that my patients were eating were killing them, but so many  seemed totally unwilling to eat less or no meat. Some actually told me they’d  rather live a shorter life than stop eating the meats they loved.” Valeti began  fantasizing about a best-of-both-worlds alternative—a healthier and kinder  meat. As he noted, “The main difference I thought I’d want for this meat I was  envisioning was that it’d have to be leaner and more protein-packed than a  cut of supermarket meat, since there’s a large amount of saturated fat in that  meat…. Why not have fats that are proven to be better for health and longevity, like omega-3s? We want to be not just like conventional meat but healthier  than conventional meat.”h  Valeti was nervous about leaving his successful position as a cardiologist—  after all, he had a wife and two children to help support. However, when he sat  down to discuss it with his wife (a pediatric eye surgeon), she said, “Look, Uma.  We’ve been wanting to do this forever. I don’t ever want us to look back on why  we didn’t have the courage to work on an idea that could make this world kinder  and better for our children and their generation.”i And thus Valeti’s company,  which would later be named Memphis Meats, was born.  Building on Dr. Post’s achievement, Valeti’s team began experimenting with  ways to get just the right texture and taste. After much trial and error, and a growing number of patents, they hosted their first tasting event in December 2015.  On the menu: a meatball. This time the giant agribusiness firms took notice.

At the end of 2016, Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, announced  that it would invest $150 million in a venture capital fund that would develop  alternative proteins, including meat grown from self-reproducing cells. In  August of 2017, agribusiness giant Cargill announced it was investing in Memphis Meats, and a few months later in early 2018, Tyson Foods also pledged  investment.  That first meatball cost $1200; to make cultured meat a commercial reality  required bringing costs down substantially. But analysts were quick to point out  that the first iPhone had cost $2.6 billion in R&D—much more than the first cultured meats. Scale and learning curve efficiencies would drive that cost down.  Valeti had faith that the company would soon make cultured meat not only  competitive with traditional meat, but more affordable. Growing meat rather than  whole animals had, after all, inherent efficiency advantages.  Some skeptics believed the bigger problem was not production economies,  but consumer acceptance: would people be willing to eat meat grown without animals? Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and Richard Branson  were willing to bet that they would. As Branson stated in 2017, “I believe that in  30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will  either be clean or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for  everyone.”

Discussion Questions

1. What were the potential advantages of developing clean meat? What were the challenges of developing it and bringing it to market?
2. What kinds of organizations were involved in developing clean meat? What were the different resources that each kind of organization brought to the innovation?
3. Do you think people will be willing to eat clean meat? Can you think