Cultivated Meat Price Per Pound
As of November 2024, conventional minced beef costs $5 to $6 per pound. It’s important to note that I’m mainly talking about minced meat in this post, not things like sliced meat or steak, which are way more complicated and pricey to cultivate.
| Meat Type | Price per Pound (USD) |
|---|---|
| Beef (Ground) 1 | 5.62 |
To make cultivated meat a viable option, its production costs need to match those of traditional meats.
In 2013, when Dr. Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University made the first cultivated meat, a single beef burger cost €250,000, which was over $330,000 at the time.
Significant progress has been made since. In the the documentary Meat The Future, Memphis Meat(now known as Upside Foods) shared that the price per pound for beef was $1,700 in 2018. When they started in 2015, the price had a couple of extra zeros. By the end of the documentary, the team mentioned that the price per pound had dropped to $50. They didn’t say exactly when this happened, but it likely occurred about 4 to 5 years ago since the film came out in 2020.
I haven’t come across any solid stats on current costs, but some cultivated meat founders have told me that production costs are still at least ten times higher than regular meat. This can change based on the specific process and the company.
We also need to think about how they calculate the costs. Do they include expenses for bioreactors, salaries, and building the facility, or is it just about the culture media? Plus, a lot of reports focus on large-scale production, which can be misleading.
Although precise production cost reports are scarce and some numbers can be a bit off, the cultivated meat industry has made remarkable progress over the past decade. I am hopeful that the cost will be as low as traditional meat in the not-so-distant future.
Beef (Ground) - Average Price of Ground Beef on FRED.↩︎