The world is changing faster then ever and as a Techie I constantly look into what technologies will change the world the next 10-20 years. So here are the technologies I watch.

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Cultured meat

Cultured Meat is in a nutshell actual meat grown from a nutshell. I do say actual meat, it as it doesn’t come from plants but it actually comes from growing meat. It might seem like a weird idea at first but I think its absolutely brilliant and exactly what our planet needs.

Farm animals are a huge problem in the EU. They emit more CO2 then all of the EU car park combined. Additionally they are now grown in megastables, one megastable for chickens can contain over 120.000 chickens. This greatly affects the environment around these stables in a very negative way.

Apart from the CO2 they produce, you also have animal suffering, drastically changes in landscape, huge transport costs, and a large impact on nature areas around them. In Belgium newspapers regularly write about the side effects. At the same time this is the only way farmers can survive in a viable way.

Did you knew 26% of the land worldwide is being used by farm animals? Imagine we can convert that to forests instead, we could really use this land to finally get back the forests EU lost hundreds of years ago.

Its a real problem that everyone is aware. I admire vegetarians, they are really contributing to the solution. I actually tried to go full-vegetarian myself, and managed to keep it up for a year, but I found that for my physical and emotional health it was not the way to go.

Of course we also feed all these animals with huge amounts of antibiotics. This is making sure that bacteria grow more and more resistant against antibiotics.

Culture meat can solve all these problems without having to cut back on anything. No longer do we need to reserve massive amounts of lands for Cows or slaughter 45 Billion chickens per year.

As an additional advantage it also means that many more types of meat that previously were hard to come by suddenly now become readily available. Want to eat some elephant without slaughtering an elephant? That will now be possible.

What companies do we need to watch?

For a few years I have been watching Mosa Meat. They were one of the first to come up with the concept in Europe. Their main focus is on beef right now.

Apart from Mosa meat there is many other companies working on this as well worldwide. For example Future Meat from Israel,

I was convinced they would be first to market however it seems that very recently a company called Eat Just (not the same as Just Eat) in Singapore has beaten them there.

Eat Just was before more known from their plant based Egg, but now they actually got market approval in Singapore to produce and sell Cultured chicken meat. They plan to go to market under the brand of “good meat”.

Cultured meat companies do have a challenge ahead. Will it taste good? Will the nutritional composition contain the proteins that makes meat so good be the same in cultured meat? Well on the taste I will judge as soon as I can.

What changes will we see?

Cultured meat needs 99% less land, 82-96% less water and emits 78-96% less greenhouse gasses. So apart from the land problem and the CO2 production, also the water scarcity problem could be solved.

Finally there will be no more need to destroy the rain forest to get farm land for animals.

In the short run cultured meat will be much more expensive then old fashioned meat, however in the years to come as production starts to scale it could actually costs two times less then meat from farm animals.

Unfortunately it will also come with the loss of jobs in the old ways as over a billion people work in this industry worldwide, however we saw this before with upcoming technologies and every time

When is this coming?

As Eat Just got market approval you can already try cultured meat right now. The only place you can so far is the restaurant 1880 in Singapore. It was to be expected that this would first be found in restaurants at the price is still quite high right now.

Goodmeat has a mailing list where you can sign up, then you will be up to date on when this is coming to EU / US.

How do you invest?

I would of course like to invest in Mosa Meat, but they are not listed right now, and it will take time before they are. Eat Just came as a bit as a surprise to me, and I was happy to learn they are actually preparing for an IPO by the end of 2021. I will be watching this as a hawk, as this is one technology I want to invest in, and not only for financial reasons, but also because because I really believe that mankind needs this for a better world.

Since Mosa meat is not available I found two other companies where you can invest in right now to be part of this upcoming industry. The first one is Meatech 3D Ltd, an Israeli company that had its IPO recently. To my knowledge it is the only company worldwide that you can invest in that researches this technology. Aside from that they also orient them differently from the other cultured meat facilities since they are 3D printing the meat. So far their IPO was not very successful , but that doesn’t mean it cannot have any uptake.

For me its just to soon to invest in Meatech but I will be watching this company for sure.

An alternative investment I found is Agronomics. Agronomics is an investment company that invests in companies that work with this technology.

Agronomics has been around for a while but has only recently seen an upside movement, most likely as we see cultured meat hitting the market in Singapore for example but also as cultured meat gets more and more exposure worldwide. If you look at their portfolio you will buy into their portfolio that has invested in 16 companies in the alternative meat industry, with about half of them in cultured meat. That’s not bad.

How will investors will make money on Agronomics? That will be for next time as I plan to do a Deep dive specifically into this company. Subscribe if you want to stay up to date there!