Cultivated meat’s “trough of disillusionment”

Between 2013 and 2023, cultivated meat companies raised a total of nearly $3 billion. In 2020, Singapore approved the world’s first cultivated meat products, with the U.S. and Israel following close behind. 

But head to the meat department of any American grocery store today, and you won’t find cultivated meat for sale. After short-lived restaurant tasting menus in the U.S., it’s no longer available. Distribution in Singapore is growing but small, and no products have launched in Israel yet. 

So what happened to the high hopes for cultivated meat? And what comes next for the industry?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, a non-profit focused on developing research in the industry. She has written blog posts arguing that the industry is in the start-up hype cycle’s “trough of disillusionment.” She calls for focusing on basic research, targeting high-value products, and even adopting a different name — cellular agriculture — to signal a shift toward a broader set of biotech products and techniques. Shayle and Isha cover topics like:

• What went wrong with the first-generation startups focused on low-value, whole-meat products like beef and chicken
• Persistent challenges in the industry, like the siloing of expertise, scarcity of research funding, and lack of standardization 
• Why she’s hopeful about a more diverse second generation that’s focused on high-value products like sashimi and foie gras and biotech ingredients like fetal bovine serum and cell culture media
• The cellular agriculture cost stack and the $30,000 batch of cookies 
• Basic research, shared resources, and the standardization needed to bring down costs

Recommended resources

• New Harvest: Where Are We On the Hype Cycle? Part I and Part II
• The Counter: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
• Biotechnology and Bioengineering: Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.

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