Prediction Not checkable as stated
GFI: Alternative proteins will increasingly become plant, fermentation, and cultivated hybrids
“These products will increasingly lean into this hybrid category where, you know, you may have a predominantly plant-based product, but it's using a couple ingredients from fermentation, and maybe it's combined with, You know, cultivated fat cells”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Specht: Bioreactor shortages will definitely crunch alternative protein growth
“This will definitely be a crunch for the industry and one where, you know, there may be some R&D approaches to sort of mitigate this infrastructure shortage in the near term.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: Nature's Fynd grows protein on open trays without contamination
“Importantly, they tolerate super acidic environments. And so you can grow those organisms essentially out in the open almost on cafeteria trays if you look at their production environment and have no closed containment because you don't get contamination.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Specht: Biomass fermentation could significantly undercut plant-based meat prices
“I think it's quite likely that those processes could pretty significantly undercut the price of even plant-based meat.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: CE Delft study shows path to single-digit dollar per kg cultivated meat
“So there was a study that came out last year from a consultancy called CE Delft that looked at a few different scenarios for cost reduction and found a path towards getting in the sort of single dollar, dollars per kilogram range and that, that agrees with int…”
Assertion Supported
Specht: The livestock sector contributes roughly 20% of global greenhouse gases
“We're looking at basically 20% of contribution to global greenhouse gases coming from the livestock sector.”
Assertion Supported
GFI: Plant-based meat costs 2x to 4x conventional commodity meat
“So the cost of plant-based meat products right now currently sits at usually anywhere from two to four X on a per pound basis relative to conventional meat.”
Insight
Specht: Food precision fermentation avoids biopharma's costly purification steps
“You need incredibly high purity, and that downstream purification is Is almost all of the cost of manufacturing those types of things. That's very different from the food space where we're talking about an ingredient where it's okay to actually have some of th…”
Assertion Supported
Specht: Plant-based meat is 1.5% of US meat, plant milk is 16%
“Right now in the U.S., which is where we have the best the best market share data, plant-based meats are at somewhere around 1.5% of the total meat market, but plant-based milks are closer to 16 or so percent of the total fluid milk market.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: JBS invested $100M to acquire a Spanish cultivated meat company
“Making investments into the cultivated meat space as well, including just last year, a really huge hundred million dollar investment from JBS, the world's largest meat company, into a cultivated meat company from Spain to acquire it. And launch an innovation f…”
Assertion Supported
GFI: Plant-based meat relies almost entirely on soy, wheat, or pea
“Almost all of them are either soy protein-based or wheat protein-based, or a fair number in this sort of latest generation of products are pea protein-based, but that's just a small number of all plant proteins out there.”
Assertion Partly supported
Specht: Eleven alternative protein fermentation facilities opened in 2021
“By our count, there were 11 new facilities that came online in, in twenty-twenty-one. A majority of those actually were for biomass fermentation”
Assertion Supported
Specht: China's Five-Year Plan explicitly prioritizes cultivated meat
“In China's recent five-year strategy, they called out cultivated meat explicitly as something that, that is a priority area.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: USDA funded the first National Institute for Cellular Agriculture
“Just late last year, we saw the announcement of the USDA investing into the very first National Institute for Cellular Agriculture.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: Cultivated meat is commercially available only in Singapore
“Cultivated meat is only available in Singapore at the moment but we know that that is working its way through regulatory assessment and food safety assessment in multiple other countries at present.”
Assertion Supported
Specht: Geltor entered cosmetics and biomedical markets before scaling to food
“Companies like Geltor that's making precision collagen or recombinant collagen, they actually went to market in markets like cosmetics and biomedical R&D that uses collagen for things like tissue culture, for example, for scaffolds.”
