Context
Ever since Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled the first lab grown meat burger on live television in 2013, cultivated meat has gained attention from consumers, researchers, governments and investors worldwide.
The promise that cultivated meat could significantly lower the climate impact associated with conventional meat production, whilst not contributing to antibiotic resistance, animal suffering or pandemic risks, resulted in large funding and investments, and a rising number of startups active in this field.
Whereas these companies have been striving to bring the first cultivated meat to market for some years now, cultivated meat will not be widely available for at least a few years (1).
Question
One of our clients, a large own-brand producer, contacted us to help them with scouting this emerging area of food science to answer the growing interest and demand of consumers in sustainable food sources.
Answer
An extensive map of players and technologies, with a strong focus on intellectual property, company funding and publicly released product details was obtained through unbiased text-mining research. The layered structure of findings allowed to obtain high-level insights about the dynamics in this field, and to reveal underlying deep-dive information, such as technological and company aspects. It created confidence to the key stakeholder to decide during a workshop upon the future positioning of the company within the landscape of cultured meat.
Another client, an ingredient manufacturer expressed it intention to collaborate with and invest in start-ups developing technologies to produce cultured meat on a large scale. The challenge here is to find the ideal partnership based on technological and business fit. Creax delivered profound insights about the maturity, feasibility, potential costs, and the weaknesses and flaws of the technologies at this point. Specific focus was laid on the technical aspects of the technology, ranging from ingredients to reactor design. Based on the insights we’ve provided at that time, our client decided not to engage directly in this domain but envisages to revisit the topic in the coming years.
References:
Further read: https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-cultivated-meat/#current-research
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