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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99, I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens. It will be interesting if subsidies can change this though. The negative externalities of raising animals must be huge. The jobs tied up in these industries are enormous as well though.

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5k burgers a day is a long way from mass production. It seems completely reasonable to expect a 70-90% price drop from scale. Until then selling at a premium to people who love meat but don’t want animals slaughtered seems like a viable.

Where things get interesting is if it actually becomes cheaper than farm grown meat. Over half of all farm land is devoted to meat production, even a 50% switch to lab meat would have dramatic knock on effects. On possibility is a dramatic increase in bio fuel production.

I love meat, and don't have a problem with eating slaughtered animals, but I still might pay a premium for these kinds of products if the environmental benefits hold up and the taste is close enough. I think there's a massive premium market. Even more so if they can start producing speciality products that are "better" than real meat along some other axis (e.g. embedded flavourings; more perfect distribution of fat etc.)

3x the price isn't too bad. Plant based "meat" is usually a bit more expensive than regular meat, and for some people paying 3x to get "real" meat without the need to kill an animal will be a worthwhile trade. Add in the environmental benefits too and it could give some people some peace of mind.

3x not to torture chickens for their short lifespan in horrific conditions is worth it even if you're not a moral vegan. The poultry industry is horrendous, and dominated by demands of corporate boards rather then farmers to boot.

I already try to buy free range, but the grim reality is that label can't possibly account for the amount of production it supposedly represents. Taking chickens with nervous systems out of the entire process is preferable.

This is where I fall on the topic as well, and I think so do many others. This seems like an easy way to bootstrap and scale this, start with a premium on the product pricing and have people who can afford it fund the scaling. At the end, economies of scale will bring the price down for the rest.

I can also totally see people buying this occasionally to supplement their regular meat consumptions.

I see free range chicken breasts for way more than that. If they’re targeting the consumers who buy based on ethics, they’ve already reached a not-unreasonable price.

It's possible, but I think that is a very difficult market to compete in. I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are wealthy enough to prefer buying free range organic chicken breast than lab grown meat, if they're purchasing meat at all. The long term play for this is almost certainly at beating factory farms on price, which has an added benefit of ethical and environmental gains.

If economies of scale exist, this is a no brainer investment opportunity. I wouldn't be concerned at all about their current price dynamics and need to earn a short term return.

> I'd wager most ethically minded buyers are wealthy enough to prefer buying free range organic chicken breast than lab grown meat.

I would easily pay more for lab grown chicken. Partly because I believe it's even more ethical, partly because I really don't trust so-called "free range organic" chicken (I already buy it when I can, but I expect the difference is minuscule).

Would you do so if it was cheaper to purchase from a local farmshare? Because it probably would be. I think I would not.

Yes, I think so. I mean, I'm not totally clear on the ethics of raising animals in a farmshare, but I am clear that the lab-grown meat is totally fine ethically, so I'll do that.

(To be clear, I eat meat now, but as far as I'm aware there's no easy way for me as a consumer to consume only meat from non-factory-farming methods.)

I'm pretty sure that the poultry industry is already receiving major agricultural subsidies to get to that price.

Yep. Animal ag is both directly and indirectly subsidized pretty heavily in the US. If we removed their subsidies and moved them to lab grown meat, the economics work out in favor of the latter much sooner.

Not only benefits from human economical point of view, but traditional farming also help environment in certain area. Animals convert plants (grass and beans from solar energy) to manure for benefiting soil. It's human that didn't evenly distribute it well. Lab-grown meat doesn't have that yet.

ps. Not comparing wild ecology to human farming, just comparing traditional farming with lab-grown tech here.

That's almost certainly true, in the very least in the form of corn subsidies for feed. My point was more that there are millions of jobs in the poultry industry alone. This is an existential threat to an enormous job market. One that is likely to become very messy. I think the US will struggle greatly to embrace this quickly, but nations that don't have large farming populations have a huge incentive to create a strong lab grown meat industry and export it. Very big economic opportunity, as well as another impending wave of poverty and irrelevance for traditional players.

$3.90 is an incredible drop in price considering what it was just a couple years ago. I'm certain the price will come down more as more competition and the technology improves. At the rate the price is falling for lab-grown meat, I'd be surprised if it is not cheaper than animal meat in a couple years. https://vegnews.com/2019/7/price-of-lab-grown-meat-to-plumme...

> I'll assume that's still ~3x as costly as just farm raising chickens.

3x? it's not even double

I'll assume you missed the fact that this is the store price vs the cost price.

If you can buy a chicken breast for $1.99 in a store then the actual cost for the meat is probably close to 80c-$1.20

That makes it cheaper than many of the vegan substitutes I've seen. It means that even without subsidies, this is economically viable, not in the future but right now (unlike the $20000 burgers that I've seen mentioned a few years ago).

There are quite good predictions for each meat type to be disrupted by cheaper vegan alternatives in the future, but what's consistent is that it will happen in the next 10-20 years.

>The price seems to be ~$3.90 to produce chicken breast. Given that I regularly find chicken breast in a store for $1.99

$2 Chicken is non-organic. Organic is ~$5 at Costco.

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