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A comment on Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat. Parent comment

Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by bjourne on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @07:30PM (#28623371)
According to the article there are no economics of scale. A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run. This is apparently a very difficult problem: "But the truth is this: For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years."
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by Sebb767 on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @09:18PM (#28624166)
> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.

This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain. No economics of scale just means that you can't get much better than linear, but in nearly all cases you at least get linear scaling.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by cortesoft on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @11:03PM (#28624823)
That is assuming that there is an elastic supply of needed materials. There may be bottlenecks in supplies that drive costs up.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by beerandt on Thursday September 23, 2021 @12:54AM (#28625318)
Is it easier to keep a city of 10k or 100k disease free? If both get "contaminated", which is the bigger cost?
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by fighterpilot on Thursday September 23, 2021 @01:32AM (#28625492)
That's a false analogy. 10 separate factories in their example would be 10 separate cities each with 10k people, not 1 large city with 100k people.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by beerandt on Thursday September 23, 2021 @08:59AM (#28628469)
That's not how you reach economies of scale.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by fighterpilot on Thursday September 23, 2021 @10:05AM (#28629324)
We all know that. Their point was that you get linear scaling using that approach, which disproves the notion that you can't get linear scaling.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by beerandt on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @01:41PM (#28685382)
Linear scaling of any project large enough to disrupt an industry (as is being suggested here) is a pipe dream.

When you are trying to scale up something that big, you eventually get beyond economies of scale for the required infrastructure and feedstock, and as a result, increase overall demand, which raises prices.

You only get near-linear scaling for a very short, initial "ramp-up" period.

Beyond that, you start cornering markets, which makes prices spike, not decrease or even hold steady.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by tablespoon on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:51AM (#28625949)
>> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.

> This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain.

No it isn't. Your "solution" is a different thing. A collection of smaller facilities is not the same thing as a larger facility.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by willis936 on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:37AM (#28627798)
You can have a large facility with 10,000 automated lines.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by tablespoon on Thursday September 23, 2021 @10:58AM (#28630106)
> You can have a large facility with 10,000 automated lines.

Read the article. IIRC, it's talking about the limits of how large you can practically scale a clean room.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by im3w1l on Thursday September 23, 2021 @08:03AM (#28627998)
Environmentalists often have a bias for small scale operation. They just really like the idea of everyone having their own bioreactor in their closet powered by their own rooftop solar panels. I think it may be simply an aesthetic preference that they then try to rationalize, facts be damned.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by Jensson on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @09:25PM (#28624213)
It depends, if they share some facilities with other functions that pay parts of the bills then those parts wont scale up. Like lets say you rent out part of your capacity to a nearby lab that pay research lab money for it, that could cover most of their expenses for a small facility. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how they are running things right now.
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