It'll never be affordable or scale up though, will it?
Short answer: The first cultivated burger cost €250,000 in 2013. Within six years a comparable patty was ~€9. Scaling is the real challenge, but the cost curve is steep.
These are headline R&D figures, not retail prices today, cultivated meat is still mostly pre-mass-market and far from price parity at the till. But the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Mosa Meat / Mark Post; Statista (2013–2019)
The objection
“It’s a rich man’s science project. It’ll never be cheap enough or big enough to matter.”
The answer
That was a fair bet in 2013, and it’s looking worse every year.
When Mark Post unveiled the first cultivated burger in 2013, it cost €250,000, a genuine lab curiosity funded by a Google co-founder. By 2019, Mosa Meat said a comparable patty cost around €9. That’s a fall of more than 99.99% in six years, one of the steeper cost curves any food technology has shown. The drivers are the same ones that crashed the price of solar panels and gene sequencing: better cell lines, serum-free media replacing eye-wateringly expensive bovine serum, and scaling the kit.
Now the half that hurts. “Cheaper than a €250k stunt” is not the same as “cheaper than chicken.” Cultivated meat is still mostly pre-mass-market. The unsolved problem is scale, not lab feasibility: building bioreactors big and cheap enough to feed millions, not tasting menus. Several companies have pulled back or gone quiet, and price parity at the supermarket is years away, not months. Nobody serious should claim otherwise.
But “never” is a much stronger word than “not yet.” Every input cost has a credible path down, and regulators in the US, Singapore and elsewhere have already cleared products for sale. The question stopped being can it be made and became can it be made cheaply at scale, which is an engineering and investment problem rather than a law of physics.