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WALL STREET JOURNAL
Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
‘Clean meat’ developers say it avoids towering costs of feeding, caring for livestock; Tyson Foods takes note
By JACOB BUNGE Updated March 15, 2017 8:43 a.m
A Bay Area food-technology startup says it has created the
world’s first chicken strips grown from self-reproducing cells without so much
as ruffling a feather.
And the product pretty much tastes like chicken, according to
people who were offered samples Tuesday in San Francisco, before Memphis Meats Inc.’s formal
unveiling on Wednesday.
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 one 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.
Memphis Meats has also
grown duck cell-by-cell in the lab.
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 hopes to begin selling its meat commercially by
2021.
The product already has 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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