Will we be eating cultured meat soon?

Although several companies have raised impressive amounts of investments, market reports vary extremely on the market value projections for cultured meat. A report by AT Kearney (2019) predicted that the global market value of cultured meat would reach 73 billion USD in 2025 compared to 2 billion USD by McKinsey (medium market size projections 2021), 386 million USD by IDTechEx (2021) and 204 million USD by Global News Wire. Are they being optimistic or too conservative in their projections and how do these projections relate to the market entry of cultured meat?

Production threshold for market entry

As indicated in our previous insight, production costs are one of the key factors challenging the scale-up of cultured meat. A report by Open Philanthropy (2020)* states that it will be possible to reduce production costs when there is a total market volume of 100 Kilotons annually (KTA) of cultured meat.

With this total market volume, a company with a production facility of 6.8 KTA will be able to enter the market with production costs of 18 EUR/kg of wet cell mass. When looking at different market projections and taking a fixed premium price of 24 EUR/kg (similar to the Beyond Burger), the year of reaching this threshold is hugely diverse (see figure)**.

In a more exponential scenario cultured meat companies might be able to enter the market already in a year from now, in a base case scenario they will be able to enter the market in 2027 and in a more conservative scenario we will have to wait until 2035 or 2039 to be able to eat cultured meat.

*D. Humbird (2020). Scale-Up Economics for Cultured Meat: Techno-Economic Analysis and Due Diligence.
**To calculate from market value to cultured meat volume, the market value is divided by a premium price of 24,19 EUR/kg (pricing of Beyond Burger in the Albert Heijn in the Netherlands). In this case, for simplicity, we assumed that the market value is equal to revenues. We are aware that the market value is no exact representation of the revenues, but it does provide an indication of volumes.

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*Note: the infographic shows our predictions under the ttopstart brand name. The company has since fully integrated into PNO Innovation and no longer operates under the ttopstart name. For more information, see the press release “We continue as PNO Innovation.”