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Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

The possibilities with this are so exciting, as someone who eats a vegetarian diet due to environmental and moral concerns with the meat industry.

It appears on their website that this is real & ready to sell. I thought large-scale lab-grown meat was still 10-20 years in the future... Does anyone know the pricing? I didn’t see anything on their website, but I feel like it must be expensive.

Also, did they pick salmon because it’s easier than other meat types for some reason?

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I'm not an expert on WildType's specific process, but I've read that while mammalian cells need to be grown at ~37 C 5% CO2, fish cells can be grown at lower temps due to differences in biology. I just read a paper where salmon cells were incubated at 13 C and 3% CO2. Could be that they're expecting energy cost savings with no need to pre-warm media, heat bioreactor, etc., but it's also possible that cooling will be necessary (depending on the location of the plant) or that mammalian metabolism will produce enough heat that bioreactor heating may not be an issue. I think the jury is still out on that. So maybe they just looked at where they could find their niche in a market with lots of pork, beef, and poultry companies already? Or maybe the founders really cared about marine ecosystems?

See the comments below - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905472

~$200 for a 6-piece sushi roll.

Ok, well that's way less than thousands of dollars so it's a start!

Not to mention, they probably haven't realized the economies of scale yet at all.

Exactly. Also if you decided to go on a boat and catch one yourself that easily could end up in thousands...

That's less bad than I thought the early pricing would be (and isn't far from the highest end sushi I've seen around the west coast here).

Its an order of magnitude higher than traditional salmon nigiri would cost though ($2-3/piece in a restaurant).

Sure, but electric cars used to be insanely expensive too. And while still expensive, they’ve definitely become cheaper with more range. That is to say, lots of things start out being expensive, and then as they get scaled up and the process gets optimized, they become cheaper.

Is there hope for some kind of law for the price steadily decreasing over time as efficiencies improve, like Moore's law for computer chips or the exponential increase of solar efficiency?

Sure, like with anything that goes into mass production.

But before that happens, the process needs to be understood and not rely on rare ingredients, for which production also needs to scale up. Are there big suppliers of salmon stemcells?

The industry term for how prices drop as you make more of something is the "learning curve".

I'd go with "economy of scale".

They're different things. I could build my own processor fab for probably around €100 000, and those things used to cost millions – but I'm not exploiting economies of scale. Rather, I can look up how to best do it instead of having to work it out myself, plus I have better other technology available (e.g. a laser cutter can be modified to make parts of it).

I'd still have the problem of sourcing materials and disposing of all that toxic waste, though, which probably isn't a problem with the salmon.

If you can build your own processor fab today for €100 000, you are definitely exploiting economies of scale. It is possible because of the massive existing industry that's created the market for, and driven down the price of parts and tools and supplies that you need to put it together and run it. E.g., that inexpensive off the shelf laser cutter you need to buy.

But that's not “how prices drop as you make more of something is the "learning curve"”.

OK, I see where we are misunderstanding each other. I was was trying to say that the decreased cost as you make more of something comes from economies of scale more than the learning curve.

This is what capitalism is for.

Demand is high, supply is low. So prices are high. Only rich can accord.

Early creators make a lot of money.

Seeing the absurd profits, others will start supplying zombie sushi.

Demand is high, but now supply is high. Prices drop.

Now even common folk can enjoy zombie salmon sushi.

No laws needed, no government regulators needed to control prices.

You mean this:

https://www.bcg.com/publications/1968/business-unit-strategy...

Yes, see Wright's Law: https://ark-invest.com/wrights-law/

I've seen that in the scope of the technology life-cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_life_cycle

Once it's taken off sometimes there is reference to the the manufacturing s-curve. That would be on the Wikipedia chart, going from when the R&D has traction to where increasing scaling increases volume and reduces costs of the product.

This falls into a class of bio-tech that I'm extremely excited about.

Sure, we can have rockets to Mars, but can we engineer fungii to create soil there? Can we grow food from cultures?

Will we care more about a lunar lander or the long-term results of mRNA vaccines? Can we cure Ebola, HIV, HPV, HSV and other social viruses? Not to mention the next pandemic, Malaria, etc?

I'm an aerospace engineer by day, but biotech (med/food/agri) is where the real social impact will come from over the next 100 years.

Have you found any information on how it's actually produced?

Look up bovine fetal calf serum and it’s roll in cell cultures.

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