US Startup SCiFiFoods Shuts Down Despite Promising Future of Laboratory-Grown Meat

TapTechNews June 17 - Laboratory-grown meat was once seen as a hope to solve food ethics and environmental issues, but reality has dealt a blow. SCiFiFoods, a startup in the US Bay Area, announced the closure just six months after announcing the completion of its first meat cultivation facility. The company had previously planned to bring to the mass market a “hybrid” burger made of a mixture of plants and laboratory-grown beef.

The company's co-founders, Joshua March and Kasia Gora, admitted in a post on LinkedIn that SCiFiFoods failed to bring any meat product to the market, and they wrote, Unfortunately, in the current financing environment, we couldn't raise the funds needed to commercialize the SCiFi burger, and SCiFiFoods has run out of time. March and Gora also said that the company's plight reflects the challenges facing today's cultivated meat and overall meat alternative market.

Although some people are disgusted by artificial meat, this technology promises to solve many ethical problems. Cultivating meat doesn't require killing any animals, and if the bioreactors used for meat cultivation are efficient enough, it is also expected to reduce the environmental damage caused by traditional animal husbandry.

However, the industry faces many practical obstacles, the biggest of which is the high production cost. The co-founders of SCiFiFoods said that when the company started in 2019, the production cost of a SCiFi burger was as high as $20,000. After five years, the company's scientists managed to reduce the cost to $15,000 (TapTechNews note: currently about 109,000 RMB), which is a decrease, but the price is still staggering.

Even worse, artificial meat has also been caught in the political maelstrom in the US. In addition to the industry's downturn itself, the co-founders of SCiFiFoods also attributed the company's failure to the intense culture war in the US. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last month imposed a blanket ban on the cultivated meat industry, and only two weeks later, Alabama followed suit with a similar ban.

Nevertheless, the US federal regulatory agency seems to have a more open attitude. Last year, the US Department of Agriculture approved the sales of cell-cultured chicken products by UpsideFoods and GoodMeat, which is a breakthrough for the industry. However, UpsideFoods, considered a leading artificial meat company, has also encountered setbacks and scandals, such as suspending the expansion of its facility plan and being accused of misleading the public about the production method of cultured chicken.