Chief Strategy Officer of OMeat, Pavle Stojkovic, gets down and dirty about cultivated meat. Can it scale? Can it reach cost parity? Will the consumer eat it? How much energy does it use? Will it be successful and if so, when? It’s another episode of The Plantbased Business Hour with Elysabeth Alfano.
Specifically, we discuss
- The reason to go after beef grounds market,
- The environmental benefits of cultivated meat, particularly when seen under the magnifying glass of the societal benefits and fewer corporate costs externalized,
- How regenerative agriculture and cultivated meat can work together, and
- The realistic – or not so realistic – timeline of getting to market and scaling.
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I want to bring on today’s guest who is the Chief Strategy Officer of OMeat, which is the only cultivated meat company that I know that is working on beef grounds.
What can you say about the safety of OMeat or cultivated ground beef versus regular ground beef?
Pavle Stojkovic: So, I’ll jump into the safety of cultivated meat in a second, but I think that we have to be able to compare cultivated meat with its equivalent in the traditional animal industry, right? So you mentioned some statistics just now. One thing that I’m still not hearing a lot of people talking about is BLV, Bovine Leukemia Virus. This is something that the USDA says is safe for us to have in our food and that we can be eating it. But now there’s tons of studies that are showing that BLV is one of the main causes of breast cancer and things like that.
So, we maintain a BLV-free herd and I think at the end of the day we can create cultivated meat in an environment that’s clean and in an environment that’s safe. We have a high level of control of exactly what’s going into it up to and including the plasma that we’re using from our cows because we know that we’re feeding them. We know what type of environment that they’re in. We know that they’re in an environment that’s more in line with what their natural state should be, which is being around other cows, having room to roam, eating something that’s in line with what their natural diets are and that translates over to the bioprocessing as well, right?
We’re not using antibiotics. The products that we’re using and the ingredients that we’re using are all food-safe ingredients and things like that. So, these are things that we have a high level of control over, comparing that to an environment where animals are stuffed together in CAFOs, where they’re using antibiotics as prophylactics to make sure that they’re not getting sick. All of these things are found in our meat today and most people have no understanding of that and they’re not getting educated on it because the meat industry doesn’t want us to know about it.
So, we have to be willing to compare these two things side by side and I think when you look at all the data, cultivated meat is a much better product and a much safer product for people to eat.
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