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UN projections estimate a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, with 70% residing in megacities, intensifying challenges in meeting food demands amid climate change. Current agricultural practices, heavily reliant on monocultures to feed livestock, are inefficient, environmentally damaging, and ethically problematic. Livestock farming consumes vast water resources, contributes significantly to deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, and threatens biodiversity. Consequently, a shift in dietary habits appears inevitable, with growing interest in plant-based protein alternatives and lab-grown synthetic meats. Companies like Evo Foods, Beyond Meat, and Impossible Foods are pioneering innovations in this space, supported by advancements in foodtech technologies such as AI, machine learning, and blockchain to optimize food production and distribution.
Economic forecasts predict that by 2035, one in ten protein servings will be non-animal based, with the alternative protein market expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2050. Despite substantial investments, including from major meat industry players, large-scale cultured meat production remains costly and concentrated, raising concerns about oligopolies. Collaboration among public institutions, private companies, and research centers is essential to scale technologies and ensure equitable access. Cultured proteins offer significant environmental benefits, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, land, and water use compared to traditional beef. However, ideological resistance and regulatory hurdles persist, with cultured meat currently available only in Singapore and the U.S. The future of food hinges on inclusive innovation, leveraging microorganisms for sustainable protein sources, and integrating technology with sustainability to address global food security challenges.
Producing food for ten billion people requires innovative solutions based on the collaboration of different actors along the entire food chain
UN estimates suggest that by 2050 there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet, 25% more than the current population, of which 70% will live in huge megacities. The demographic issue, combined with climate change, poses complex challenges, based on how to meet humanity’s food needs.
The current system, which involves monocultures to feed the animals we eat, is terribly inefficient and harmful to biodiversity. At the same time, livestock farming requires enormous water resources and is among the main causes of deforestation and greenhouse gas production, not to mention the ethical problems that intensive farming presents.
It seems inevitable that sooner or later we will have to change our eating habits. For example, many companies are moving towards creating plant-based alternatives to animal proteins: the startups Evo Foods, Just Eat, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are pioneering excellences in this regard. In addition to plant-based alternatives to meat, there will be other more experimental ones, such as synthetic meat produced in the laboratory.
To make agri-food production smarter, sensors, data and analysis tools, predictive models created thanks to machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain will play a key role. All this makes up the call foodtech, an expression used to identify a category of innovative solutions that take advantage of digital technologies for the production, preservation, processing, packaging, control and distribution of food.
A report published jointly by Blue Horizon and Boston Consulting Group estimates that by 2035 one in 10 servings of protein will be of non-animal origin. The market for cultured meat and various plant-based substitutes is expected to be worth $1.1 trillion by 2050 (compared to $897.5 billion for the meat industry in 2022), according to the
The economic challenge
It should be remembered that some giants of the meat industry also participated in these investments, such as the Brazilian JBS and the American Tyson Foods, as well as the Swiss company Bell Foods. It is estimated that there are 9.8 million potential jobs in the sector. The protein market is a reality, but to achieve economies of scale, the GFI estimates that investments must increase to $10.1 billion in total.
In 2022 there were 156 cultured meat companies, a large-scale factory costs around 60 million dollars and cellular agrifood requires bioreactors, cultivation land, cells and huge investments that are only within the reach of a few entities in the world, with the implicit risk of creating new oligopolies. To make a truly decisive contribution to ensuring humanity’s food needs, synergies between public and private entities, companies and research centres are needed.
As Mark Post, CSO of Mosa Meat and one of the expert voices present at the XXXIV meeting of the Bankinter Innovation Foundation’s Future Trends Forum on ‘The food of the future‘, explains, “the risk of oligopolies exists, since proteins require expensive infrastructure and large global players are the only ones who have that investment capacity. In addition, while consumers prefer to pay 49.5 cents instead of 50 cents for a hamburger, large-scale installations are favored.”
Collaboration between the different actors along the entire food chain becomes essential to address the challenges in this area. Post underlines the critical role of public funding, “which helps to ensure the persistence of activities even in difficult early stages, for example by providing technological enablers (such as computational modelling) that are not immediately commercially attractive”.
In addition, Post continues, “publicly funded activities play a key role in promoting the search for solutions and training future generations of experts in the sector, such as feed and food producers, who can provide the conditions for these technologies to materialize and grow: cell cultures and microorganisms (for precision fermentation) also need nutrients .”
According to Post, cultured proteins generate 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, use 99% less land, and 96% less water than beef from livestock, helping to protect our planet from climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. However, there is still strong ideological resistance, often fuelled by the political class under pressure from some economic lobbies.
Common front against skepticism
Currently, Singapore and the United States are the only countries where cultured meat can be purchased. In the face of persistent skepticism, Post points out that “it is important to use all motivations, including the desire for variety, to promote food innovation,” advising to emphasize the fun and satiating aspect of food, to involve a wider audience.
In fact, one of the pillars on which the world of alternative proteins is based is that of inclusion. To simplify the concept as much as possible: it is about allowing people who follow different diets to sit at the same table. For this reason, what could be defined as the ‘alternative protein movement’ travels along a parallel path to veganism, with which it has several similarities, but also obvious differences.
On 5 April 2023, FAO and the World Health Organization published the results of a joint research, entitled Food safety aspects of cell-based food. The document covers everything from terminology to safety, industrial processes and the regulatory framework, all with an exclusively scientific approach.
It can be read: “Meat production has evolved over thousands of years to meet the demand for safe and affordable proteins. With a rapidly increasing world population, it is important to carefully consider whether cell-based foods would help provide healthy, nutritious and sustainable food for future generations, while also reducing environmental impacts (…) improving animal welfare and reducing the risk of zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans.”
It’s just the beginning of the road. The biggest changes in the FoodTech sector will derive from the cultivation of microorganisms such as fungi, bacteria, yeasts, algae and microalgae. All of them provide an important source of protein, which in the future could also be extracted from the air and carbon dioxide, using renewable energies and resorting to the production of probiotics to convert the elements into nutrients.
The future of food will be determined by a combination of technological innovation, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and an imperative focus on sustainability and human health. The ability to adapt and adopt new technologies will be key to meeting the food challenges of the 21st century and ensuring a nutritious and sustainable future for future generations.
