Cell cultures need to be sterile, the sugars, growth factors, and other nutrients used need to be highly refined. These are not requirements that are likely to change in the foreseeable future.
In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g by 2021, which would be cost competitive.
And while chickens are somewhat efficient, they're not as efficient as culturing techniques ought to be at scale. Memphis Meats' process will require 3 calories of input to produce 1 calorie of beef. That's just better than chicken, and massively better than beef or pork.
* They don't need to reach price parity to be financially successful. I'm sure there are people out there (former vegans/vegetarians or those considering veganism/vegetarianism) who would pay a marked up price. People already pay marked up proces for things like grass-fed beef and uncured meats.
* Is there any evidence that these price decreases hold at scale? There's a world of difference in being able to provide a market niche with artificial chicken at low cost and being able to produce enough chicken for the whole market at those marginal costs.
Put your prediction on PredictionBook? It's a great way to keep track of your predictions, and learn to be calibrated (e.g. to have about 80% of your predictions-of-80%-likelihood be correct, which doesn't come naturally to people).
Assuming I'm reading it right, the perfectly calibrated guesser would trend towards a straight line going from 50 on the left to 100 on the right.
They also have a way-too-addictive game where you can practice calibrating your confidence on a bunch of trivia questions: http://predictionbook.com/credence_games/try
Would this somehow be different?
I am not a biologist, so I am genuinely curious...
Further, the breeds of chickens used for meat are usually for meat, eggs for eggs, etc - at least at the industrial scale.
That said, as a long-time vegetarian I would still guess that animal protein is likely to stay more resource-intensive than plant protein. But it could still be an improvement over our current situation, especially in terms of our treatment of animals, and use of water and feed.
"Ever"? Really?
I could see it for the next 5 years or so, but beyond that all bets are off.