I saw my first fake meat company in 2015 at the graduation event for the first class of startups at the IndieBio accelerator in San Francisco, doing egg whites. Now leading companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have landed their fake hamburger in fast food chains.
At breakfast yesterday with my boss’s boss, he remarked that some of the burgers are actually quite good, and we agreed that (someday) it has the potential to be a trillion dollar business. This seems to be one of the rare examples where the outrageous predictions by tech entrepreneurs of creating a huge new market might actually be true.
Adoption Paths
The initial pioneers may grab decent exit values, and the long-term future of replacing meat seems compelling. California alone spends 6 trillion liters of water a year on alfalfa alone (feed for cattle and horses), not counting other states, and the water for pig slop and chicken feed. Meanwhile, cow farts play a non-neglgible role in increasing greenhouse gasses. And there is also a sizable niche of the populace that either refused to eat meat, or even wants to deny others the right to do so.It’s not clear when it will become a trillion dollar market: as I showed in my 2014 paper in the Journal of Technology Transfer, California firms created the solar industry but flamed out because they got into the market 20-30 years too early. Competing with commodity electrons is a tough adoption curve: very few people voluntarily choose to pay 50% or 100% more than market prices for a commodity, although Germany and California show that politicians can force their voters to do so and (mostly) get away with it.
What I didn’t realize until I thought it through is that meat has an easier adoption curve, with a wide range of niche markets that can be sustained at premium prices. You have affluent people who don’t eat meat — or, even better, recently gave up meat — as well as environmentally conscious customers who would like to avoid meat. You have people who are willing to give it a try, out of curiosity. And — as the burger joints have demonstrated — the B2B customer (distribution) is willing to try a niche product to raise average selling prices.
Thus, as the product gets better and the prices get lower, these firms can establish and grow their beachhead in the food market, carving off ever-larger segments of the market. Funded by Sand Hill Road and led by ambitious entrepreneurs, some will hold off for Facebook-style IPOs, but many of the weaker players will be bought up by ADM, ConAgra, Hormel and the like — providing bottomless capital to spur innovation and adoption. (The entry barriers are low enough that Tyson Foods is launching its own product directly, rather than by acquisition).
We Need Science
However, to fully displace meat, there are major technical challenges to be overcome, both in quality and cost. I supervised a student project to research synthetic organs — a more demanding applications — but still getting the texture right will require both science (new insights) and engineering (new applications) to create a quality product at a competitive price.Thus, I was struck by the decision of one fake meat company to attack GMOs to win market share. Yes, the CEO is a 24-year-old recent Berkeley grad who’s never worked in a company. Yes, her bachelor’s degrees are in toxicology and environmental studies rather than molecular biology or chemical engineering. But the company does have one PhD (food science) in its leadership, so they presumably are doing actual science.
It reminds me (and not in a good way) of the various surveys that showed the gap between what the public thinks and what scientists (writ large) think about GMOs, including a 2015 survey that said 37% of the public thought GMOs are safe vs. 88% of scientists.
More troubling is that the certainty of these opinions seems inversely proportional to actual knowledge. As the NY Times wrote on Monday:
So I get that trust in authority has been declining since the 1970s. I get that we have many people who don’t understand — or have the time to personally verify — scientific research. And, as Orwell predicted (and Goebbels proved), people are easily persuaded to believe lies if they are repeated often enough in the mass media.In a paper published early this year in Nature Human Behavior, scientists asked 500 Americans what they thought about foods that contained genetically modified organisms.The vast majority, more than 90 percent, opposed their use. This belief is in conflict with the consensus of scientists. Almost 90 percent of them believe G.M.O.s are safe — and can be of great benefit.The second finding of the study was more eye-opening. Those who were most opposed to genetically modified foods believed they were the most knowledgeable about this issue, yet scored the lowest on actual tests of scientific knowledge.In other words, those with the least understanding of science had the most science-opposed views, but thought they knew the most. Lest anyone think this is only an American phenomenon, the study was also conducted in France and Germany, with similar results.
Still, why would companies that depend on scientists to create their products help promote such lies? Isn’t the benefit of saving the planet enough, without having to rely on junk science for the purpose of virtue signaling? And if companies that depend on science attack science, what are the implications for K-12 and university science indication, science policy and the idea of using facts — rather than emotion - as the basis for making science policy?
