Why is this significant?
Industry disruption rarely comes from within the disrupted industry. Most often an industry is looking left when the danger is to the right! To Be Prepared we need to Understand The Signals of change and the recruitment of significant cultivated meat resources by big Pharma is a signal we can’t ignore.
I’ve been predicting the serious entry of large pharma into the cultivated meat sector for a while now and the job ads by Merck are confirmatory signals of the direction of the industry. Interestingly they’re for centres in both the US and Germany so it’s a serious push into the sector.
Samsung went from electronics to being big in biopharma and so moves by pharma and other related companies into meat production isn’t a big shift at all.
Don’t laugh, we could yet see Merck/Tyson or JBS/Pfizer. Why not? Pharma companies have all the skills, expertise, revenue and infrastructure to grow mammalian and other cells and meat companies have the industry knowledge, marketing and distribution resources!
It’s big pharma that the conventional meat industry needs to watch, not just the startups. Kodak was watching Fuji, not the electronics industry, look what happened to them!
