Opinion
Datar: Cultivated meat may fail while lab-grown milk and eggs succeed
“Cellular agriculture as a concept is so much bigger than meat, and it's very possible that things like milk proteins or egg proteins or just ingredients in our food Are actually going to make a bigger difference for the climate and for nutrition and food and a…”
Insight
Datar: Cultivated meat startups shouldn't attempt full vertical integration early on
“If we actually think about a world where food is grown from cells, we need a really robust, diverse kind of economy behind it with many different players and so on. We can't just come out of the gate vertically integrated like the meat industry today.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Datar: Cultivated meat is in the 'trough of disillusionment' but will happen
“We're in this kind of trough of disillusionment, as they call it in the hype cycle terminology, where people are like, what do you mean this thing will never happen, it's been way too long, when actually, it will happen, it's just, now we've kind of set oursel…”
Insight
Datar: Venture capital is improperly subsidizing basic research in emerging tech
“It's a lot easier to be a private company raising VC money to do research, which is ultimately should just be basic research, because the stuff that's going to be competitive and on the market probably can't happen until that first research happens.”
Opinion
Datar: Cultivated meat regulatory approvals are investor milestones, not commercial rollouts
“I don't always know if the approvals are like the most significant thing. Like to me, they kind of read like a investor milestone more than a, oh, this is just like the last stop before we blow our product up on the market kind of thing.”
Insight
Datar: Biopharma lacks incentives to lower costs, but cell ag must
“Biopharma has set this precedent that this is what the price of things should be, and they have no incentive to bring the prices down. Cellular agriculture does have an incentive to bring the price down, and it must bring the price down.”
Insight
Datar: Cultivated meat factories should resemble food processing, not biopharma
“But I also think if we're willing to have that same disruptive paradigm shifting mentality, that maybe the manufacturer of this looks more like vitamin or food processing or those kind of other still factories, still produce stuff that you consume, but isn't t…”
Opinion
Datar: Commercial cultivated meat manufacturing requires hundreds of millions in CapEx
“I would say tens of millions of dollars could make something that's really great right now that would be useful for the whole field. Hundreds of millions, we'd start getting into more, like, manufacturing, you know, in a, like, way that is more than, like, a c…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Datar: Climate change and avian flu will destabilize chicken prices
“The price of chicken is not as stable as we think it's going to be, especially in a climate changed world. We're seeing that with the price of eggs right now, with the avian flus. And so, you know, let's, let's not forget that things that seem constant for the…”
Insight
Datar: Lack of shared facilities in cultivated meat causes redundant capital waste
“What's happening now is the companies are all building their own separate facilities. There's no standardization. If one works, great. If one doesn't work, like, no one would know why it doesn't work, and then it doesn't prevent the next person from spending t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Datar: Cell ag growth media startups can pivot to selling to pharma
“Even though that's a big cost center, that is actually kind of like a good place for business right now, because you can sell better media, cheaper media ingredients to pharma today.”
Insight
Datar: Cultivated sashimi avoids cooking unpredictability inherent to cultivated meat
“There's a big scientific process, like food science transformation that happens when you cook something. And cultivated meat, you don't know exactly how it might perform in a pan. You hope it's going to be exactly the same as the cells from an animal, but you …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Datar: Less marketing distraction will yield better cell ag science over time
“I also think in the next five years, better science will happen because the distraction of marketing and comms is decreasing, and so all these little kind of news tidbits about what's going on that really, you know, they sound big when they come out, but did t…”
Opinion
Datar: 'Cellular Agriculture' Is Preferable Because Meat Is Not a Sector
“Well, my favorite term is cellular agriculture because I don't think meat is a sector.”
Assertion Supported
Datar: Cellular agriculture lacks standardized cell lines common in biomedicine
“We don't have those standardized cells in cellular agriculture. So where one researcher in the biomedical space can just open up a catalog and say, hey, I need to order this, and this, You understand how they perform, and you just get to work on your work. The…”
Insight
Datar: Growth media is the largest ongoing cost in cultivated meat
“The media that you're feeding the cells is probably going to be the thing that costs the most. Same, same like with animals. It's like the feed that's the biggest contributor to the cost of a cow.”
Assertion Supported
Datar: Cellular agriculture research has boomed significantly since 2015
“There's institutes of cellular agriculture around the world, where in 2015 there was zero. There are hundreds of grad students working on cell ag research around the world, where in 2015 there was like two, you know, like I could count them on one hand.”
Isha Datar