Memphis Meats serves first lab-grown chicken strips as cost halves to $9,000/lb

Memphis Meats grows meat from self-reproducing cells instead of slaughtering animals — cell-grown beef in 2016, then the first cell-grown chicken strips in March 2017.

That cell-grown meat would ride a fast cost curve — $18,000/lb in 2016, $9,000/lb by 2017, targeting 2 cents/gram by 2021 — to become price-competitive with farmed meat.

Memphis Meats is a Bay Area food-technology startup growing meat from animal cells. By the time of the March 2017 Wall Street Journal story it had already demonstrated a cell-grown beef burger, at a production cost of about $18,000/lb just under a year earlier, and it described its output as meat from self-reproducing cells — no slaughter — while skeptics noted the 2016 burgers still used fetal bovine serum in the growth medium.

On 2017-03-15 the Wall Street Journal reported that the company had created what it described as the world's first chicken strips grown from cells in a lab and served them at a tasting. HN submitter Seth Bannon — a vegetarian of 20 years — attended, wrote about it, and said in the thread that production cost had fallen from $18,000/lb to $9,000/lb in under a year, still too high for commercial viability, with a stated target of about 2 cents/gram by 2021, which he called cost-competitive. The discussion also noted that both the FDA and the USDA were looking at clean meat and each thought it should be the regulator.

Meat is a trust product: Memphis let journalists and a 20-year vegetarian taste the cell-grown chicken, making clean meat tangible rather than a lab claim.

The numbers were the pitch: cost was still about $9,000/lb, but halving in under a year gave the 2-cents-per-gram 2021 target a believable slope.

Chicken was the harder target: the thread notes conventional chicken is the hardest meat to beat on price, so a credible chicken demo signaled a platform, not a stunt.

Regulation was the open risk: with both the FDA and USDA eyeing jurisdiction, Memphis's runway depended on rules that had not been written yet.

Publish the cost curve, not just the demo: Memphis made a $9,000/lb product credible by putting each price drop on the record — $18,000/lb to $9,000/lb in a year — toward a $9/lb 2021 target.

As of 2017-03-15 Memphis Meats was live but pre-commercial: it had served the cell-grown chicken strips at a private tasting covered by the Wall Street Journal, at a production cost of about $9,000/lb — down from $18,000/lb in under a year but far from viable — with a stated goal of about 2 cents/gram, roughly $9/lb, by 2021. Regulatory jurisdiction was unsettled, with both the USDA and the FDA reported to be looking at clean meat. Its earlier beef burgers had used fetal bovine serum, and the company made no animal-product-free claim.