Plant-based meat is about to get cheaper than animal flesh, report says
It’s all but inevitable that the plant-based meat industry will eventually be cost-competitive with conventional meat, given the recent flurry of new production capacity among the existing companies.
VEGNEWS: ‘Vegan meat may soon become cheaper than its animal-based counterparts, according to a new report compiled by Liz Specht, PhD, senior scientist at food nonprofit Good Food Institute. In the report, Specht outlines the obstacles that plant-based food producers face when aiming to compete with meat companies. When it comes to profit margins, companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are currently charging as much as the market will bear in order to funnel profits into expanding production capacity to meet surging demand. “Lowering prices would just lower their revenue, which would, in turn, hurt their ability to scale and meet demand,” Specht said. These companies are also at the mercy of using ingredients derived from a bigger supply chain such as soy and pea proteins which are primarily grown for other uses, including animal feed and oil.
Specht believes that once plant-based companies are big enough, they will flip this factor and drive the optimization of raw ingredients, creating side streams for other companies. Additionally, these companies’ current manufacturing facilities are built to handle smaller scale production but Specht anticipates an exponential development in this area, as well… Lastly, since many new vegan companies are funded by venture capital with the expectation of creating novel technologies, early funds are often used for research and development purposes, a cost that is passed onto the consumer initially but is reduced greatly as the new technology is scaled…
“Industrial animal agriculture has been operating and optimizing at a global scale for decades. Yet it is still inherently more efficient to make meat directly from plants rather than feeding our crops to animals and then eating a part of the animal,” Specht said. “It’s all but inevitable that the plant-based meat industry will eventually be cost-competitive with conventional meat. In fact, this tipping point may hit relatively soon, given the recent flurry of activity reflecting new production capacity among the existing plant-based meat companies and the involvement of new entrants with massive resources”.’ SOURCE…
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