Nice To Meat You

Lab-grown meat startup Primeval Foods announced plans to hold upcoming tasting events in NYC and London featuring a variety of exotic offerings, including the world’s first cultivated lion meat.

🥩 A deeper dive... So far, most cultivated (i.e., lab-grown) meat companies have focused on the biggest categories: beef, chicken and pork. 

• But Primeval is betting there will also be a market for more unconventional dishes like leopard burgers, Siberian tiger tacos, and zebra sushi rolls.
• Once its products gain regulatory approval, the company said it’ll start by offering samples to Michelin-starred restaurants in London, with further plans to expand on a larger scale.

💰 Zoom out: Investors have poured ~$2 billion into cultivated meat projects over the past two years, according to Crunchbase data.

• The idea behind the push is that growing meat in a lab eliminates the need to farm animals for food, which would help reduce the nearly 15% share of global greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock.

✋ Yes, but… Since lab-grown meat is not yet produced on an industrial scale, there’s still uncertainty over whether it’ll actually end up helping the environment. And sales of cultivated meat in the US have cooled off recently, dropping 0.5% in 2021 after reporting a 46% increase the previous year.