First 100 x reduction in media costs, now 700% productivity increase in bioreactor meat output from Ever After Foods. What’s next? The question is can you stack all of these advances? Does this mean with these two advances alone you can reduce costs by 700 x?
The most common bioreactors are from the pharma industries but are focused on producing proteins from cells, not the cells themselves. As CEO Eyal Rosenthal says “lab-scale production volumes and efficiencies are entirely different from those of large-scale systems. Producing high densities of cultivated meat demands disruptive technology and engineering, as increasing viscosity and shear stress limits productivity and scale.”
Ever After Foods system will apparently be much less capital intensive, which is now the biggest problem faced by alternative protein and other new food technologies. They’ll sell the technology to other cultivated meat companies, which could lower the barriers for the industry as a whole.
The mind boggles at the exponential rate of advancement in cultivated meat technology. It begs the question of what is the ideal combination of all of the available advances? The real test will be when a commercial scale production facility comes online. Hopefully that’ll be within the next 3-5 years.