Since the dawn of man,
meat has been on the menu.
A pure beef hamburger.
♪ Chick-Fil-A ♪
Over a pound of meat.
We have the meat.
And even with growing trends
of vegetarian diets and plant-based substitutes,
around 89% of the world population
consider themselves omnivores.
We have come a long way
from our hunter and gatherer roots.
We have managed to establish a whole industry
designed to feed almost 7.7 billion people.
We've maximized production
and we've managed to reduce hunger
over the past couple of decades.
And although we've become exceedingly efficient
at putting meat on the table,
raising livestock animals by the billions
comes with its own set of consequences.
If animal agriculture
continues to expand the way it has
there's a risk that we won't be able to stop climate change.
But with rapid advances in technology,
we might soon see a food industry
that leaves all those problems behind.
I'm about to be
one of the world's first commercial customers
for lab grown meat, cultured meat.
To Eat Just is the company and I'm very, very excited.
Here is the chicken.
Looks pretty crispy outside.
It's really good.
I mean look it's really tasty.
Here at 1880 in Singapore,
cultured chicken is being served
under a regulatory approval
granted by the Singaporean government.
It's the very first time a cultured meat product,
meat made from animal cells grown in a lab
has been approved for commercial sale.
Eat Just, the company behind
these chicken nugget style dishes
is based out of San Francisco
and got their start in 2011
developing plant-based egg substitutes,
like mung bean scrambled eggs and mayonnaise.
But it wasn't until 2017
that they announced they were shifting focus
to a cultured meat product.
In order to feed the world that we live in
a lot animal protein,
we need to take a third today and it'll be more tomorrow
of our world
and make it dedicated to feeding chickens and cows.
We go to areas that are filled with biodiverse rainforests,
taking a bulldozer to them and planting soy and corn
to feed the chickens that we eat.
Climate change is accelerated
by the kind of animal production that we engage in.
When we bring animals in tiny little spaces,
it accelerates the probability that more zoonotic diseases
are gonna impact our families.
And from a morality perspective,
why do we need to cause any harm to any other living thing
to have dinner that tastes good?
It does not have to be that way.
And those things underlie the force of this idea.
The meat alternatives
that have made it to the market thus far
have been plant-based,
imitation beef and pork
made from ingredients like pea protein and coconut oil
by companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.
That's a very different proposition from cultured meat,
which is made from actual animal cells.
I'm a huge fan of any company, of any person,
trying to make a product that's improving the food system,
including all the plant-based proteins.
Maybe in some future menu,
you'll have this kind of cultivated chicken
and you'll also have a plant-based version.
That's fine.
But I guess you have to ask yourself in our lifetime
is that diner likely to also remove the conventional option
on the menu too?
We do think we need a more permanent solution.
We do think we sort of need, if you will,
an end game to this problem.
And we just think this is more likely
to be the path to achieve that.
So animal cell technology
has been around for several decades
for applications such as development of vaccines
and other biotherapeutics.
The first known prototype of cultured meats
was done by Mark Post earlier in 2011.
And essentially he was developing a beef patty.
It was a very expensive prototype.
If I'm not mistaken above 250,000 Euros at the time
to produce just one beef patty.
It was more of a proof of concept
to really demonstrate that this technology is possible
and that it can be done.
The way that we grow and produce cultured chicken
is essentially we isolate chicken cells
from the chickens without having to kill them,
so from a small biopsy, for instance.
We immerse these cells in a liquid broth
that contains the nutrients that the cells need to survive
and be healthy and to grow.
We really need these cells to multiply,
to reach the numbers that are sufficient
to make a meat product.
We're looking into the cells
that are really important for meat.
So we think about muscle cells, fat cells.
By that isolation,
we are able to form those muscle tissues in culture.
The culture happens inside of a fermentation tank,
what we call the bioreactor,
which is essentially providing
the same conditions as the animal body,
warm temperatures, some sort of mechanical stimulation,
so that the cells are exposed to very similar conditions
that they have inside of the animal.
After the cells proliferate and reach a certain density,
the final step is essentially
to separate those cells
from the liquid broth that they are in.
We just make sure that the product
meets our quality and safety standards,
and then those cells are ready for consumption.
Milk, cheese, yogurt,
a lot of those derived from fermentations.
The only difference is that they are starting
from a different cell type.
In this case, we're just using the animal cells
as the initial and beginning of the product.
Eat Just has developed chicken nuggets so far
with far more textured chicken breasts
planned for the future.
But another cell-based meat startup Memphis Meats,
has already started working
on culturing other animal cells as well.
We've done beef,
we've done duck,
we've done chicken.
And these are things that are favorites
in various parts of the world.
For instance, people in America
love beef and chicken.
People in China love duck.
So we wanted to show that we at Memphis Meats
can produce meats that we as a global population
love to eat.
There's a lot of similarity in how we grow the meats
from various animals or fish,
but they're also different
because of nutrients they need
and how they actually come together
to form the final product, the meat.
And I think it's very similar
to how we also grow various animals.
There's similarities in the feed
that we give cows and pigs and chickens,
but there's also differences how we cultivate
and it's very similar for us as well.
So we've been working with the FDA and the USDA
for the last three years
at really developing the guidelines
on how this food should be regulated
when we come to the market.
As soon as we get regulatory approval in the United States
people that will be able to go to their supermarket
and buy it and enjoy it,
they'll be able to go to a restaurant near them
and order meat directly from animal cells.
But it's not just getting the meat right.
Once approved, the gates open
to a very high potential demand
and scaling becomes the next big hurdle.
Before we could only make chicken for myself, my friends,
my girlfriend, my family, my colleagues.
Now we actually have the ability
to make chicken for millions of people.
So that allows us to invest
and to allow the economies of scale to drop the price.
The second is we need to reduce the cost
of the nutrients that these cells are consuming.
So I think chicken feed
raises or drops the price of chicken.
The nutrients we feed ourselves does the same thing.
So we need to drive that down.
The cell density is another technical element.
We need to continue to increase that.
And hammering all those things
over the course of the next five, 10, 15 years
will put us in a place
where we're significantly below the cost
of this animal protein
and that will be one of the main inflection points
that will lead to a new way of eating meat.
So here is a closeup of a half-eaten crispy chicken bite.
You know what?
What I'm really thinking is just I'm eating chicken.
I like chicken.
You know, the normal chickens eat,
I don't know where they came from.
And so I don't know why I should be very stressed
where this came from either.
The meat market is worth
more than one trillion dollars annually.
And there are over 60 startups in the cultured meat field.
Cultured meat has attracted several prominent investors,
including Sergey Brin, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates.
What is also interesting is that even meat giants,
such as Cargill and Tyson have invested in the space.
It's this disruptive potential of the market
as well as the promise to greatly
reduce the climate impact of meat production
that has attracted investors.
It remains to be seen
who will get regulatory approval in which countries
and whether consumers will like lab grown meat
enough to make the switch.
And while there's no evidence
that lab grown meat
is any less healthy than traditional meat,
there's an ongoing debate
over how healthy eating meat is in general.
But if these products are a success
they could be the beginning of a more humane,
less destructive meat industry.
The food and ag industry
is the most innovative industry in the world.
It's always figured out how to feed a growing population
and we've never failed doing so.
And it's been very clear to us that we are part of that
and we're gonna figure out
how to feed the next three billion people joining us
and I just see an evolution.
We can do this a bit differently.
We can do this in a way that is consistent
with the kind of people that we want to be,
the kind of planet that we all want to live in.
We can build a food system
that reflects really the best characteristics of who we are
and that makes me really hopeful.