Alex Crisp, host of Future of Foods Interviews, speaks to Anthony Chow, co-founder of Agronomics, about the future of cellular agriculture and the negative press surrounding the cultivated meat and plant-based industries. He also discusses the challenges faced by plant-based products, particularly regarding their pricing, health concerns, and the need for innovation to attract conventional meat consumers.
Agronomics is a leading UK listed investment company with a portfolio of more than 20 companies operating in cellular agriculture, precision fermentation and biotechnology.
Here is a clip from the podcast:
Alex: You mentioned in some interviews that there is a deliberate attempt by certain media to discredit the industry. You actually said in March that there’s one particular journalist who is responsible for lots of the negative sentiments and negative articles. So do you think this is a big problem?
Anthony: Yeah, look, firstly, that one journalist published three articles, one in The New York Times, one in Wired and one in Bloomberg.
Alex: What’s the name of the journalist?
Anthony: Joe Fassler.
Anthony: They all said the same thing, essentially. They were all focused primarily on a company called Good Meat. And then all those articles came out. To a lesser extent, Upside Foods also copped a bit of flak there. I don’t know what his agenda is. He’s, I guess, trying to make a name for himself to some extent. These headlines are really not helpful at all.
This is a slow process and there aren’t going to be any sort of absolute step changes in the progress that we’re making. It takes a long time for biology to be done properly and for the cells to be trained to perform in a certain way in the right cost-effective media and so forth.
Those headlines are not helpful, but I think more than anything, they create a lot of questions in potential investors’ minds that are looking to this field and thinking. If a generalist investor starts looking at cultivated meat thinking it might be interesting, some of the first headlines that they will read in their desktop research will be those negative headlines and I think it can scare people away. It does, I believe, unfairly mask some really impressive progress that we’re seeing at companies that are improving scale, bringing costs down.
Yes, we’re not there yet. None of them are, but my resolve in funding these companies and seeing them through has not changed. I think the good companies that emerge from this really challenging period are going to emerge with less competition and then more market share to themselves.
Alex: The negative press towards cultivated meat coincided with a lot of the negative press towards plant-based foods.
Anthony: Yes. I have no way of proving it, but there was definitely a lot of negative messaging, particularly around the health aspects of plant-based burgers and the ultra-processed nature of them. The challenge that they had is one, they couldn’t refuse it. They are highly processed, high in sodium to make up for a lack of taste and high in saturated fats.
I think they’ve probably improved them since then, but you couldn’t really argue against that. I think by far the bigger issue that has been learned and was obvious to us, hence we didn’t invest in the plant-based products, is that you can’t ask consumers to pay more for a product that is inferior. That is just not a recipe to getting repeat purchasing, and that was born out of the numbers.
Plant-based products have completely stalled in terms of sales growth and volume growth. It is of some frustration to me that my LinkedIn profile continues to be littered with messaging around plant-based changing the world. I think that this is not in touch with reality, notwithstanding that I have nothing against those products, but they had their time.
Unless they’re enhanced with precision fermentation proteins or ultimately cultivated meat in the form of hybrid products, I just don’t see that they’re going to be good enough ever to get the conventional meat consumer to adopt them.
Alex: That’s interesting. You have a couple of plant-based companies on your portfolio. You have Rebellyous Foods that make plant-based chicken, which they say is as good as the real thing. It tastes as good as chicken.
Anthony: I have actually never had the opportunity to try that product. It’s only available in the US. That is a very modest investment for us. By all accounts, it is actually doing very, very well. Revenue growth in the face of what is otherwise a stagnant or declining market, so they’re taking market share. Then, the other slightly larger investment is LiveKindly. That is now the eighth largest plant-based company in the world.
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