> this project has been part of our overall endeavor to develop the biotechnological production of daily and familiar commodities that are conventionally produced by agriculture.

I'm afraid I have to call BS. The nutrient medium used to feed the cell cultures will contain glucose or sucrose most likely from industrially-grown corn or sugarcane as a carbon source and other nutrients.

I.e. in this case biotech isn't getting rid of an agricultural production process and magically replacing it with something sustainable - it's simply shifting the agricultural supply chain more upstream and out of view.

Could it still be more sustainable compared to traditional coffee growing? I doubt it very much given all the input required to run commercial-scale bioreactors. Those things are energy intensive, produce waste water, and require complex nutrient broths and sterility. If you're claiming sustainability benefits in such a fuzzy situation, at least have an LCA to back up the claims.

What about commercial feasibility? Extremely unlikely. Most if not all of the dealbreakers recently outlined in the context of commercial-scale lab-grown meat will apply here too [0].

But perhaps they can bioengineer some novel coffee characteristics unobtainable otherwise and sell it for $500 a cup.

[0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...