Key Advantages

Food and agritech specialist Dr Rosie Bosworth identifies five key advantages of alternative meats over traditional proteins:

1 Animal ethics: Plant-based meat bypasses the ethically dubious industrial animal farming model associated with animal cruelty, such as inhumane and intensive farming factory and battery farm conditions.

2 Health and safety: Plant-based alternatives can be specifically designed to be nutritionally superior to and safer. Companies like Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and SunFed Meats each contain higher vitamin, mineral and protein levels than traditional animal meat without the added hormones, antibiotics, high fat content and cholesterol animal meat is tainted with.

3 Business model: Animal ag is constrained by slow time to market cycles due to animal gestational terms and growth rates. Farcical transportation logistics also increase the price volatility of animal meat. By contrast, alternative meat can be produced 24/7 all year round, much more quickly, and close to the very urban centres that require food.

4 Scalability: Production of cellular and plant-based meats, when scaled, has the ability to sustainably produce safe protein substitutes to meet the growing demands of protein, at below current commodity prices and with less supply constraints.

5 Environmentally friendly: Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of food, energy, water and land — both for grazing and feed crops. Alternative meat production process is drastically more environmentally friendly than conventional animal agriculture in all camps.