Business

To validate the financial feasibility of our idea, we answered the following questions:

1. Is the Cultivated Meat Market big enough ($1 B <)?
2. Does the path to an even bigger market exist? Will this problem scale?
3. Is thinking in an international market feasible?
4. Since the market is untapped, why hasn’t the problem been solved yet?

In the following subsections, we will do our best to explain our reasoning why innovation right now is central.

1. Market Overview

Our target segment is the cultivated meat industry, with our adjacent verticals being cell therapy & regenerative medicine, and vaccines & biopharmaceuticals, making our idea multi-fold beneficial.

For this section, we focused specifically on our entry market.

The cultivated meat industry has been a hot topic in many mainstream consultancy and banking reports, being covered by McKinsey, Barclays and Kearney amongst many. [1]

The market size as of now is scaling from a humble estimate of $1 B to $20 B by 2030, with forecasts reaching $230 B and more by 2040. By 2040, cultivated meat will make up 35% of all meat products, overtaking vegan alternatives and challenging traditional meat’s dominance. [1] [2]

2. Investment Landscape

Based on our human practices conversations, funding into cultivated meat startups has been scarce. Between 2016 and 2022, the industry attracted $2.8 billion in total funding, with North America leading at $701 million, followed by the Middle East and Europe.

The UK ranks second globally in deal count, confirming that our surroundings are well-equipped to support our project reach industry, but its cumulative investment in the sector lags behind greatly compared to other regions. This gap is expected to narrow as engineering biology has recently been designated a strategic investment priority in the UK, a development that is likely to benefit the cultivated meat industry as well [3].

Further, investment in the cultivated meat industry has been on a downturn since 2022, resulting in the closure of companies. 2023 can be seen as an inflection point between a time where there was a lot of hype around cultivated meat, with short term promises and unmet potential, causing investor panic leading to declining venture support.

This confirmed that although the cultivated meat market is still up-and-coming and faces some acceptance issues, there is enough proof showcasing its importance and the loss-of-interest in the segment is more attributed to investor panic rather than the abandonment of the idea.

3. Technological Progress

In just a decade, production costs plummeted from $250,000 for a proof-of-concept burger (2013) to a hypothetical $12 per pound of chicken breast (2021), making this a 99% drop powered by breakthroughs in cell culture media and bioprocess advances.

The over 155 startups worldwide are racing to find a competitive edge, with prices and yield being primary targets. Enabling access to high-yield growth media, would hypothetically decrease production costs by at least 50%, with further decrease during the downstream processing stage enabled by our K. phaffii platform, making our project a key enabler.

4. Consumer Acceptance

There is a perception of overall market acceptance being low, but recent consumer surveys prove otherwise.

Although awareness of cultivated meat remains uneven, ranging from 23-66% across different countries, even those where cultivated meat is already sold, like Israel or Singapore. In Africa, awareness reached 64%, and in Brazil 38%. European familiarity varies from 23% (Greece), to 73% (Slovenia), UK being in between with 50%. This data is showing that education and terminology matter more than exposure alone.

As our market entry poi nt would be B2B growth factors-as-a-service, our project is only indirectly influenced by the consumer market. We would be required to improve not only consumers, but also our direct customers’ beliefs of the future of alternative media.

This poses the question, why hasn’t the growth factor issue been solved yet?

Based on our Human Practices conversations, the reason why cultivated meat companies seem to close down isn’t firstly due to a lack of affordable growth factors, but more so due to a market coordination failure likely caused by investor skepticism. Particularly, potential contract manufacturers which could stably supply large quantities of growth factors are disincentivised from developing the facilities to do so since there is currently no active market. This on the other hand is due to lacking investment in prospective cultured meat companies, with investors likely heeding doubt due to failed promises made by companies riding a wave of hype. Therefore, investor confidence must be regained through validation.

To explore the demand and profitability of our idea, we constructed a Lean Business Model Canvas to map our assumptions and guide our strategy. We chose this approach because Lean Canvases, based on the Lean Startup Methodology, allow ideas to be developed and communicated quickly, avoiding the time-consuming nature of traditional business plans. We focused on turning complex models into a single, visual overview that highlights the most critical elements: the problem, customer, and solution. This made it far easier to align our team, communicate the concept with stakeholders, and identify weak points early. Ultimately, using the Lean Canvas helped us lay the foundation for reconstructing our pitch deck with a sharper, investor-ready focus.

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of organization that would gain the most value from our product and has the resources to pursue it. Developing an ICP allowed us to better understand who we are truly designing our solution for. While most iGEM projects focus primarily on academic use cases, we chose to go further by defining an ICP to determine which businesses a synthetic biology B2B like ours would realistically sell to.

Developing our ICP helped us clearly define who benefits most from our solution, both technically and commercially. By understanding the specific characteristics of business that struggle with growth factor costs and scalability, we were able to identify the right industry partners to contact for our Human Practices outreach and ensure our conversations reflected real market needs. This process also strengthened our business case in front of investors, allowing us to justify our market focus with researched claims.

Finally, as part of our Human Practices outreach, we put together a Pitch Deck that went through multiple rounds of iterations before it reached its final version that we deemed investor-ready.

Regarding key conversations, the pitch decks was made possible through actionable feedback from Victoria Faber and Nelli Morgulchik, while the final version was tested through an investor pitch simulation with Dr. Pedro Lovatt Garcia, Hugh Bowen and Olivia Brown. These simulations were particularly valuable, as in an ideal scenario we would aim to pitch our idea to organisations such as Imperial Enterprise Lab, SOSV Ventures, and Creator Fund. Imperial Enterprise Lab serves as the first point of contact for Imperial-based ventures, offering early-stage support and incubation opportunities. In contrast, SOSV Ventures and Creator Fund specialise in deep tech and academic spinouts, making them highly relevant for the commercialisation of synthetic biology innovations like ours.