Milk and meat manufactured in a laboratory are here to stay and need to be viewed as a serious challenge, according to Silicon Valley think-tank Singularity University’s regional ambassador Kaila Colbin.
Ms Colbin, speaking at the annual Australian Dairy Conference, Melbourne, last week, said the price of artificially produced meat had dramatically dropped in price in a very short time.
Scientists had also “grown” milk, in the laboratory.
“Chemically, molecularly and genetically it was milk – it just hadn’t gone through a cow,” Ms Colbin said.
She said her first reaction was “that’s disgusting, who is going to want that?”
“But they don’t care about farmers, they are targeting industrial caterers,” she said.
Food processors, which used milk ingredients, had to declare dairy on product labels, because of allergies.
“All of a sudden, they can get completely around that and have the same net result,” she said.
“I think people might be surprised at how large the retail sector will be for this.
“I know milk alternatives, like soy, rice and oats compete for the same market share, but they never really become a threat.”
Ms Colbin said it would be a mistake to believe people would always want “real milk” and not to worry about the manufactured product.
Ms Colbin said the “poster child” for milk replacement was Perfect Day, which used to be called Moo Free.
“They are not yet commercially viable, but they are about to launch,” she said.
“There are a whole bunch of people working on it, there is a lot of money flowing into it and it is an absolutely solvable technical problem.”
The first stage was acceptance that artificial dairy was coming and that it was a real thing.
“There are very valid reasons why people will buy these things and those reasons can represent a significant market share,” she said.
Farmers would need to differentiate themselves and “go hard out,’ with concepts like regenerative farming to making milk a super premium “almost like an artisan product.
“What may happen is market share goes way down, but profits are up, because you are filling a higher end niche market.”
Milk manufactured in a laboratory would follow the trends, set by artificial meat, created by companies such as Impossible Foods.
“It’s not that they created a burger a vegan can eat, it’s that they created a plant based burger that a meat eater will eat,” she said.
That’s what we are going to see in the dairy sector, as well.”
Impossible Foods had made a burger which “sizzles and bleeds.
“And they sell out, everywhere they go.”
Memphis Meats meatballs were on sale in general supermarkets, across America, and the company could not make them fast enough.
“One of the things they have done really well, and they have been really smart about, is their channel to market,” she said.
“I think, when they first started working on these things, the idea was the wealthy would get the real meat and the great unwashed would have the bioengineered meat, and it would be terrible.
“But they have put this stuff out to the highest end chefs in America.
“When they first launched these plant based burgers were $40 and you couldn’t get ‘em because they were in the most expensive restaurants you could find.”
While laboratory grown meat was a little further off, China had recently invested $300 million in Israeli start-ups, looking to create it.