Plant-based and cultivated meat have been as soon as hailed as inevitable—however the highway to reinvention has been far messier than predicted. In Meat: How the Subsequent Agricultural Revolution Will Rework Humanity’s Favourite Meals—and Our Future, Good Meals Institute founder Bruce Friedrich pulls again the curtain on the structural, cultural, and market forces slowing progress throughout the choice protein sector. The next excerpt gives Friedrich’s insider perspective on why the motion has stumbled—and what nonetheless wants to alter for the subsequent section to succeed.
It’s true that buyers haven’t but flocked to plant-based meat; that’s as a result of many of the merchandise aren’t adequate, and all of them value an excessive amount of. It’s additionally true that investments in plant-based and cultivated meat firms have slowed fairly a bit. The explanations for that embrace investor expectations that timelines to commercialization for cultivated meat can be faster and misunderstanding about what’s required for plant-based meat’s success. All that stated, various meats are actually not alone; larger rates of interest, inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty have chilled startup investing throughout all sectors aside from AI.
Steakholder Meals
In response to plant-based meat’s flagging gross sales and the fundraising struggles of each plant-based and cultivated meat, there have been tales within the enterprise press claiming that the idea of change has been tried and failed. That’s improper.
The plant-based obituaries seem like this: plant-based meat was the new new factor, however now plant-based meat firms are struggling. Gross sales are down. The merchandise are too costly, they usually don’t style adequate. Ergo, plant-based meat has been tried and failed.
The cultivated meat obituaries seem like this: there was a number of pleasure for cultivated meat between 2019 and 2021. Startups raised $3.1 billion {dollars}, together with from Invoice Gates and Richard Branson, in addition to Cargill and Tyson Meals. The place’s my cultivated burger?
These articles miss just a few essential factors.
Past
First, all the plant-based meats that buyers take pleasure in value much more than their typical counterparts. The nonprofit group I based—plant-based and cultivated protein nonprofit The Good Meals Institute—ran the numbers and located that plant-based meats value on common about twice as a lot as typical meat in 2025; plant-based hen has an excellent steeper value differential. It’s worse than that, although; probably the most meat-like plant-based merchandise value much more. Second, the merchandise additionally don’t style adequate but. When NECTAR (a nonprofit initiative specializing in sensory analysis on various protein merchandise) examined 122 plant-based meats in 2025, 102 out of 122 significantly underperformed, and never a single product achieved style parity (although six got here super-close). Cultivated meat additionally prices an excessive amount of, the science is early, and manufacturing is simply starting.
And as for that $3.1 billion invested in cultivated meat? It appears like quite a bit, till you understand how thinly it’s unfold.
That whole has funded greater than 150 firms worldwide, overlaying not simply R&D but in addition costly gear, lease, manufacturing checks, salaries, and extra. It’s additionally not a one-year whole; it’s an all-of-time whole, encompassing the primary funding in October 2015 and increasing via June 2025.
To place that quantity in perspective, contemplate this: the common value to carry a single drug to market between 2009 and 2018 was $1.3 billion, and that’s for a pharmaceutical firm that already has all the mandatory gear and infrastructure, regulatory techniques in place, and so forth. That’s greater than twice the quantity raised by the best-funded cultivated meat firm Upside Meals, for all its operations going again to its first funding in 2015. A single EV-battery manufacturing unit prices between $3.5 and $5.2 billion. That’s greater than has been spent on all points of cultivated meat in all of historical past.
Eat Simply
This expectation that costly, first-generation merchandise would displace typical meat inside just a few years of first prototype can be quite a bit like asking why automobiles hadn’t displaced horses in 1890, why computer systems hadn’t changed typewriters in 1980, or why EVs hadn’t changed gas-powered automobiles in 2010. In every case, the merchandise have been too costly and didn’t but fulfill shoppers. Innovation and scale have been required. Identical factor right here.
It’s true that some plant-based and cultivated meat firms have struggled and that others have failed outright. Information articles about these struggles have generally recommended that one firm’s struggles might be seen as a proverbial coal mine canary. However once more, that misses one thing essential about innovation: most firms fail, they usually fail not due to technological challenges however for one of many different 99 causes that working an organization is difficult.
The largest and most evident problem is the shortage of capital, since with out capital, you’re not an organization—irrespective of how sturdy your science. My pal Michael Grunwald jokes in his glorious guide about local weather and agriculture, We Are Consuming the Earth, that on the 2019 Good Meals Convention, he nervous that somebody may write him a verify to begin an alt meat firm whereas he stood in line for espresso. Simply three years later, that funding pool, like a lot of local weather tech and meals startup funding, had largely dried up.
Upside Meals
One other option to fail is to do one thing that appears like the idea of change however isn’t. Many plant-based startups anticipated income with out analysis. They assumed they may replicate the success of Unimaginable Meals with out spending a dime on analysis and growth. That didn’t work, and most of them failed. That had nothing in any respect to do with the science of plant-based meat; in reality, it was validation of its necessity.
As some plant-based and cultivated meat firms have run out of cash and closed, I’ve seen just a few founders counsel that the world merely didn’t need plant-based or cultivated meat. “We constructed it, they usually didn’t come,” stated one. However that is, to not put too tremendous a degree on it, nonsense: as of 2025, the world doesn’t but have a taste- and cost-competitive plant-based or cultivated meat product. The speculation of change has not been tried and failed; it has not but been tried.
Operating any firm is difficult. It’s exhausting for everybody, after all, however it’s particularly powerful if your organization is launching a brand-new product and is attempting to compete with an incumbent that almost all shoppers don’t (but) discover wanting.
Discover out extra about Bruce Friedrich’s new guide Meat, which Publishers Weekly placed on its checklist of the ten greatest new releases in science, at MeatBook.org.
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