RethinkX | 6 May 2024
Precision Fermentation and Cellular Agriculture are both modern food production technologies that will produce the foods that disrupt and replace the products of animal agriculture. However, they are fundamentally different technologies.
Precision Fermentation is a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule such as proteins (including enzymes and hormones), fats (including oils) and vitamins through the natural, age-old process of fermentation.
The programming of microorganisms is enabled by advances in precision biology, which is the coming together of modern information technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and the cloud, with modern biotechnologies like genetic engineering, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, systems biology, bioinformatics and computational biology.
Cellular Agriculture is also underpinned by many of these elements of precision biology, but instead is a process that allows us to grow and proliferate animal cells outside the animal in an effort to replicate animal products like whole cuts of meat or fish.
We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.
This is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of modern proteins will be five times cheaper than existing animal proteins by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035. Eventually, they will be nearly as cheap as sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute–more nutritious, healthier, better tasting and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. Foods made through cellular agriculture will also come to disrupt the sector. This means that by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.
Learn more about the disruption of food & agriculture.
Published on: 12/07/23
