Memphis Meats has figured out how to make a real meatball in the lab using beef cells, not cows.
(In Vitro meatballs the video>)
At a demo day for the IndieBio accelerator program in February, Memphis Meats cofounder and CEO Uma Valeti laid out the three main problems he sees with today's meat industry: the demand for meat is growing faster than we can keep up with it, there are looming health risks like E.Coli and antibiotic resistance, and it takes takes 23 calories of grain to make one calorie of beef — an unsustainable amount.
Still, scaling up will be the main hurdle for Memphis Meats. People aren't going to want to pay a premium for an unfamiliar product like lab-grown meat, so the company will have to get the cost down to the price of normal beef (if not lower).
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