Making cultivated meat cheap

In early 2018, the California-based start-up Memphis Meats, now called Upside Foods, was celebrating progress in its quest to make meat from animal cells grown in a bioreactor-a product that many firms call cultivated meat . Cultivated meat companies hope to do away with slaughterhouses and to sustainably feed the world's growing population by slashing the amounts of fossil fuel, water, and land required to produce meat. Traditional food companies trying to lower their own environmental footprints are very interested. Over the previous year, Memphis Meats had served lab-grown chicken to a group of taste testers and raised over $17 million in funding from Cargill, Tyson Foods, and other investors. But at the time, Memphis Meats' chicken was highly expensive to produce. One of the biggest issues was the cost of growth media: the mix of sugar, proteins, and other nutrients that feed the cells in a bioreactor. So that