A compelling case for cellular aquaculture
[climateer here, I thought putting the 'trillion' in the headline was pretty damn compelling]
Seafood that has been produced in laboratories directly from fish cells could be worth more than the lab-grown or plant-based meat in time, with a $1 trillion market ready to be exploited.
So argues Paul Cuatrecasas, founder and CEO of Aquaa Partners, who thinks that “the next major revolution to our society – like the change from the horse and cart to the automobile – is probably going to be in food.”
Speaking in a webinar entitled “COVID-19 – accelerating change in the food industry: how the foodtech sector can help strengthen the industry’s resilience to future shocks”, Cuatrecasas delivered a compelling argument that a number of “small start-up companies in food today are going to change our world, it’s just a matter of time.”
In particular, the author of Go Tech or Go Extinct focused on plant-based and lab-grown meat and fish producers – highlighting the meteoric rise of a number of companies in these fields.
Plant-based proteins “Plant-based protein has really taken off in the last few years, with Beyond Meat doing an IPO last year and then Impossible Foods launching the Impossible Burger in Burger King. In April 2019 it announced it was launching in 57 Burger King stores in St Louis – it was so successful that it increased footfall by 15 percent in one month, which blew away any other experience that Burger King had ever had in any of its 7,000 stores in the US,” he explained.Impossible Foods, he pointed out, recently launched in Kroger, while Beyond Meat is now in “many, many stores” and is valued at $8 billion, despite only having a few hundred million in revenue, while Tyson Foods – one of the largest meat processors on the planet – has $40 billion in revenue but is only valued at $16 billion.
“They expected it would take a year or nine months, but after 1 month they decided to roll it out nationally. That’s how popular it was,” he added.
“Beyond Meat, this small little plant-based company, is already valued at half one of the largest meat processors in the world,” he pointed out.
He added how Impossible Foods just raised $500 million, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has already raised $1.3 billion and has a mission to replace the use of animals as food by 2035.....MUCH MORE
“You’ve got to give that company the benefit of the doubt,” he predicted.
Lab-grown meat
Cuatrecasas believes that, while labmeat companies might be “2-3 years behind” the plant-based producers, in the long run they “might be even more powerful”...
