UPSIDE Foods touts lab-grown meat as a sustainable market solution

On the last day of BioProcess International 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, Kalle Johnson, senior director of cell culture media at UPSIDE Foods, addressed the challenges and promises of bringing cultivated meats into restaurants and grocery stores.

Johnson said that the global demand for meat was projected to double by 2050, which is a daunting reality given the environmental footprint of factory farming. In meat production, land use, water use, and air pollution are all among the major contributors that threaten sustainability and in some cases lead to climate change.

According to Johnson, 14.5% of the greenhouse gases produced by humans come from animal agriculture. There are also ethical concerns related to the treatment of farm animals, which are slaughtered at a rate of 72 billion per year.

Johnson compared the environmental impacts of beef, chicken, and pork production in several metrics with the laboratory-grown equivalent. In almost all cases, the laboratory grown alternative showed significant sustainability gains over its conventional equivalent. That was especially true with beef production, which is by far the least efficient and most environmentally impactful of the animals shown. For example, Johnson said cultivated beef production accounts for less than 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the conventional product.

Conversely, laboratory gains over conventional chicken production are relatively modest. Johnson said that revolutionizing beef production was a priority for his company.

The Manufacturing Bottleneck
Because the demand for meat is so high, UPSIDE and other cultivated meat companies must prepare for the intense scale up that will be needed to meet demand. “Right now, one of our major focuses is making sure that we scale up properly to lower costs and bring meat to the masses,” Johnson said.

By one projection, the cultured meat market could grow from a 2022 valuation of $373 million to $6.9 billion by 2030. Johnson shared further projections, including one from McKinsey & Co that predicted cultured meat will account for between 0.5% and 25% of the $1 trillion meat market share by 2030.

Even at a conservative 0.5% growth estimate, the current global media supply doesn’t have nearly enough material to support the burgeoning cultivated meat industry. Johnson said that “to make half a percent of the global meat supply using cultivated meat, we would need to grow that media supply ten to 20 fold.”

In a fireside chat with BioProcess Insider at the end of his presentation, Johnson briefly addressed the attempts of some states – including Florida – to make the sale of cultured meat illegal. Although he could not go into detail about UPSIDE’s communication with lawmakers in that state because of a pending lawsuit, he said that there is a question as to whether such a law can even fall to the states, or whether it is instead a federal matter.

According to an August article published by Food Dive, UPSIDE’s lawsuit claims that Florida’s law is unconstitutional and stifles competition from outside the state.