Something unusual is going on in the fledgling but
fast-growing lab-grown meat industry. A technology that was developed to
displace meat and end animal farming has, in the last couple of years,
received a boost from an unlikely source: meat companies.
Take Tyson Foods,
the world’s second-largest processor and seller of beef, chicken, and
pork. If you’ve ever eaten a hamburger or a chicken nugget in the United
States, that cow or chicken was reasonably likely to have been
slaughtered at a Tyson Foods processing plant. This February, the
company announced it was launching its own plant-based products line, manufacturing meat alternatives made out of plants.
And that’s not its first foray into meat alternatives. Since 2016, Tyson has made investments
in plant-based and lab-grown meat research and operations, putting
money into the cell-based meat startups Memphis Meats and Future Meat
Technologies Ltd., and in the plant-based meat startup Beyond Meat.
It’s not just Tyson. Last fall, Perdue Farms announced
it was looking into its own line of plant-based products. Cargill,
another major meat producer, was also among the investors in Memphis
Meats.
These recent investments are the latest turn in the
encouraging development of the plant-based and lab-grown meat industry.
Plant-based meat and dairy products like veggie burgers, fake chicken, and soy and almond milk
are growing in popularity and in market share — and even better,
they’re getting tastier and harder to distinguish from animal meat.
Meanwhile, cell-based meat — grown from animal cells in a lab
— is still probably years from availability in stores, but it’s growing
too, with surveys suggesting that consumers in the biggest markets want to try it and the US government laying out a regulatory framework.
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