Beliefs Elicitation Responses

Will CM cause some new animal welfare problems? Should we treat the live cultured "meat" as one kind of animal?

Media costs will be quite low. Questions remain around productivity and capital costs.

Hydrolysates may become incorporated in a decent number of manufacturer's media formulations over the next decade. It is unlikely you'd fully replace purified AAs. You'd still likely need to supplement them in. It's also unclear if hydrolysates are truly cost beneficial.

The only reason it's not 100% is to allow for the use of certain feed-grade components, e.g., to form a "cultivated meat-grade" standard.

Needs clarification. Many companies are likely to have input on the design of reactors, but are unlikely to build them themselves.

It is pretty important. FCR may differ between "lean" cells and fat cells. A target lower boundary is likely around 3:1 kcal in/out. Metabolic engineering/adaptation and media optimization play a major role in determining this. Processes will need efficient conversion if they aim to be cost-competitive.

If research obtains a real scale up of CM and this impacts meaningfully on intensive farming, CM would have a much higher impact, making it probably the best investment for AW.

Considering the revolution that a large scale CM adoption would be, the trade off is so high in my opinion.

It is very important, I think TEAs shoud adequately account for this and you should focus on the second approach

I think that undifferentiated products will not be enough to attract consumers, differentiated products are needed.

I'd say it's likely that hydrolysates will contribute to a substantial portion of the basal media used at this time, but almost certainly supplemented by some amount of purified amino acids. I suppose I would say I'm pretty confident (~80 or more?) that both hydrolysates and purified AAs will play substantial roles, but I'm not confident at all in what that breakdown will be - could easily be 30/70, or 70/30.

The switch to food-grade ingredients represents a very substantial "low hanging fruit" cost reduction opportunity, both in the sense that it's an easier technical problem than many of the others and the cost differential is quite high. I would therefore expect that few products beyond the very earliest ones launched would use substantial amounts of pharma-grade ingredients. I would entertain the idea that there might be a few hold-out ingredients that for some reason are hard to substitute, but if we're talking about the composition of the bulk of the media, this is one I'm fairly confident in. If a substantial portion of products are using substantial amounts of pharma-grade inputs, that probably means that cultivated meat hasn't made much progress (in terms of scale-up, cost reduction, adoption, etc.) by 2036.

In an ideal world, I think we would see a substantial proportion of companies using fit-for-purpose bioreactors built by B2B companies, as this is a pretty substantial thing for each individual company to take on themselves. I would actually expect this number to go up as companies move away from pharma-grade bioreactors, but then come back down as non-pharma B2B options improve. Predicting the exact trajectory is difficult though, so pretty low confidence on this one.

At the very least, it will be necessary to account for the moisture content (and ideally, the caloric density) of the input and product. If these are defined, then $/L and L/kg effectively give you a feed conversion ratio.

It seems like a very reasonable decision to simplify the discussion by limiting it to undifferentiated cell mass, but differentiation does seem like a pretty important thing to consider in the future, as it could substantially change the cost calculation but also may be quite important from a sensory perspective.

consumer acceptance at large scale, and government willingness to support/incentivise this alternative way of producing meat

Short term I believe funding CM will not exceed the benefit of AW campaigns. However long term (>10 years) it will, since research and development of this technology together with consumer adoption, will provide a longer-term benefit. I believe however that all these interventions (campaigns, dev of alternatives) need to go hand in hand, so I would not deprioritise one over the other

Cultivated meat is not a short-term solution or intervention, and I don't think it should be seen as such. Investment in research in the field is crucial to transform it into a reality, but I think expectations should be managed accordingly - otherwise we will end up in the same situation we are now: early investors in the field were promised that CM will reach the market fast, and due to technical challenges it did not happen; therefore investors lost trust in the field because their expectations were not met. CM research should be funded in a way that ideally makes it more independent from investor pressure, to allow the field to grow a bit more organically and with more collaboration.

Largely based on 'vibes' having spent time in the field -- trying to get an answer in without much time to process systematically. Academic perspective, industry relations, fog of war. Validation of industry claims and further transparency of industry performance would be strong influence. Development-oriented R&D pubs from either academic or industry would be strong influence.

i need to better understand the alternatives here and their current/projected performance. CM has such massive potential, seems clearly highly-ranked on this basis alone

depends on the time horizon of the benefit measure and how you compare benefit across different timepoints. long-termism, this is hard to beat IMO. Need to learn quite a bit more about alternatives, admittedly

Known Feed-Conversion-Ratios of about 20 L/kg biomass, target price of medium of 0.3 EUR/L, and costs of CAPEX. Changing FCR or medium costs will most likely reduce the price

Plant-based alternatives of unstructured food are already viable and valid. IMO it would be needed to have structured CM products, to replace the whole cut meat. However, the technology for whole cut CM is not yet available at competitive prices

100k USD is not sufficient to move the needle in the industry, which is still under construction

If it is cheaper and there are large volumes of hydrolisates available (and I think so), CM should use those. However, it might take some time before we reach significant production with those ingredients, 2036 might be too soon

Keeping FCR of about 20 and medium cost of 0.3, best case scenario the medium reaches 0.1 EUR/kg and more realistically the price will settle around 0.5 EUR/ L (considering 1 EUR~1 USD)

Most likley perfusion will be the dominant technology, although probably continous bioprocess should be ideal (assuming to effectively reduce contamination)

I do not think everyone has the expertise and time to build their own bioreactors (if there is VC money involved, there is little time to try and learn how to make a bioreactor in-house)

FCR must be taken into account, without this parameter it is unlikely to have a clear idea on the unit price of the medium per kg of biomass. This number also varies for undifferentiated and differentiated cells, and it would be necessary to understand how much is the variation and if there is a medium cost target to achieve to make this difference irrelevant on the final CM price

I based this off of numbers that I think are fair for certain key metrics in 2036:

- 0.5USD/L media
- 75g/L wet biomass at max bioreactor density (approximately 37.5 million cells/mL, based on 2 ng weight of fibroblasts on average)
- a fill-and-draw bioprocess in a stirred-tank reactor
- a cell doubling rate of 24 hours per doubling
- A process whereby cells are grown to maximum bioreactor density (75 g/L), then a fill-and-draw process whereby: every day, 50% of the reactor is harvested and 50% of media is added back into the reactor. This process is continued for one month (e.g., 30 days of daily harvests).
- Approximately 10% loss upon harvest.

With this process, the raw materials costs of were calculated based on space-time-yield (STY) using the equation: cost = (Cost_media[0.5$/L]*(1+(fill_volume[0.5L]*fill_number[29fill-and-draws])))/(harvested_density[67.5g/L]*run_time[30days])

~$3.8 USD/kg. I then doubled the cost to include costs of equipment and downstream processing/harvest as a rough estimate. This gives $8USD for my median. The higher/lower bounds are driven by cases of lower media costs, reduced harvest lost or higher facilities/downstream costs. Key metrics of change are media costs, facilities costs, and viable cell densities in a given media formulation.

I think that hydrolysates are an incredibly attractive option; however, I'm not sure that ultra-low-cost purified amino acids aren't equally likely.

I do not think that growth factors will be needed for production in 10 years. The upper bound is defined by necessity; the only way GFs will stay in the process is if they can be cheap enough to very minimally impact total price.

This is essentially the first term in my initial equation, so approximately 3.8 usd/kg.

I think that a fill-and-draw process maximizes simplicity and productivity. My numbers here assume a 50% harvest from the total vessel daily, and a 24 hour doubling time (so the vessel reaches max density again the next day).

I see no reason why this would not be 100%; I think it will get there far before 2036

I think there will always be a push to simplify by buying reactors and verticalizing that expertise. Very few industries build their own production equipment (if any?). My thought that there will be some here is based on the fact that I think there will still be innovation/new approaches being developed in 2036. At full maturity, I think a vanishingly small number of meat producers will make their own reactors.