This Bay Area company seeks to become the world’s largest grower of cultured meat at 30 million pounds per year

Eat Just is building enormous bioreactors that will test how much cell-based meat one company can successfully grow.

One of the Bay Area’s leading food-tech companies just inked a deal to manufacture the world’s largest known bioreactors for growing meat from cells. Ten of them.

It’s an ambitious move from Good Meat — a division of popular vegan egg maker Eat Just Inc. in Alameda — in partnership with equipment manufacturers of bioprocess equipment ABEC Inc.

The company is one in a growing cultured meat industry that is trying to create a protein source that might end humanity’s reliance on industrial-based animal agriculture — a leading cause of climate change. Despite the lack of regulatory approval in the United States, investors are pouring billions into the sector and supporting more than 100 startups. Good Meat is the first to announce this kind of step. At 250,000 liters each, these bioreactors — tanks that allow animal cells to proliferate — will likely be the biggest and most complex in the world to fabricate.

Once built, these bioreactors will enable Good Meat to produce huge quantities of cultured chicken and beef without any need for slaughter — potentially 30 million pounds per year, according to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just. He said that number would allow the company to distribute to major retailers and thousands of restaurants in the U.S. In comparison, cell-based meat competitor Upside Foods recently opened its own pilot facility in Emeryville, which might produce up to 400,000 pounds annually.

“This is an expensive facility,” Tetrick said. Expensive is no joke. The company declined to share numbers, but industry experts suggest it will cost $400 million to $650 million to build it.

Making such large bioreactors will be a first for ABEC. “While there are some technical challenges, there are none that we feel can’t be overcome,” said Scott Pickering, CEO of ABEC, which until now has supplied only the biopharma industry.

Even a single 250,000-liter bioreactor is huge. Ten of them will need space — a facility roughly 200,000 to 220,000 square feet in size on acres of land. The physical location is yet to be determined but will probably be found “in the next few months,” Tetrick said. The front-runners are in Pennsylvania, Utah, Colorado, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. The company won’t stay local because of high costs and the potential for earthquakes.

Despite this bold announcement, regulatory approval in the U.S. is still pending. Without the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s green light, the 100-plus cultured meat startups hoping to feed the world a different version of animal meat must wait. While Good Meat has regulatory approval to sell in Singapore, it has produced and sold less than 1,000 pounds of chicken this year — or about 323 chickens.

Going big in scale will put pressure on all other costs, including creating media — which fosters cells to grow — and improving cell density, which refers to the ability to grow more cells in each batch. In 250,000 liters, there are hundreds of trillions of cells. At this scale, media inputs such as glucose, amino acids, vitamins, salt and water will be expensive. To help, Eat Just recently partnered with Archer Daniels Midland — an $85 billion global nutrition company — to work toward ways to lower production expenses.

“The team at ABEC sees a high degree of likelihood that we can make it work at 250K-liter scale,” Tetrick said. But there’s still no certainty. He gives his team a 70% chance at successfully growing animal cells in bioreactors of this size.

ABEC is also designing and manufacturing smaller bioreactors for Good Meat’s Alameda headquarters, scheduled to be operational in late 2022, and for a Singapore facility slated to open in early 2023.

Some analysts are skeptical that Good Meat’s plans will pencil out. No one has ever proved that it’s possible to grow cultured meat beyond 5,000 liters.

“I think it will fail because they are pushing the biology well beyond what anyone has ever validated,” said Paul Wood, professor of biotechnology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “There’s a business there, but it’s not a commodity business, and 250,000 liters is saying we’re chasing a commodity market.” Instead, he said, startups would be better off focusing on high-end steaks or other expensive meats.

It’s unclear what Good Meat’s chicken will cost whenever it hits the U.S. market, and the company declined to share. But spokesperson Andrew Noyes said the price could fall below conventional chicken by the end of 2029.

In the meantime, hurdles for the cultured meat industry continue to appear around every corner. Namely, will people want to eat it? So far there’s at least some proof in Singapore.