Cultivated meat and the aspirational strategy
TL;DR: Cultivated meat should focus initially on offering exotic products like quail to fine-dining customers, following the aspirational, premium-first marketing strategy of Tesla and Facebook.
Cultivated (aka cell-cultured, lab-grown) meat has gone from interesting hypothetical to early-stage commercial deployment. Producing one kilogram cost $2.3m (USD) in 2013 and $63 in 2024. It is available in restaurants and approved by the US FDA. On the assumption that the cost continues to fall and availability increases, the question is: how to sell it?
Selling meat grown in a bioreactor is always going to involve some difficulty. The reality of animal agriculture is highly industrialised, from factory farms to chemical pesticides to international just-in-time supply chains to food processing plants. But decades of ag-industry propaganda has convinced us that animal agriculture is natural, clean and organic, and we imagine meat coming from free-roaming cows grazing on scenic hills. By contrast, meat coming from a bioreactor seems artificial, unhealthy and gross. This ‘ick’ factor is probably the single greatest obstacle facing widespread adoption of cultivated meat other than cost.
I believe the path to addressing this reluctance is clear. Call it the ‘aspirational’ strategy, after the concept of an ‘aspirational brand’, where a product is initially premium before moving to mass adoption. Two instructive examples are Tesla and Facebook.
Tesla
Electric and hybrid cars such as the Prius were initially marketed towards climate-conscious types who wanted to help the planet. The original cars were low horsepower, and underperformed compared to their combustion engine peers. The Prius was marketed as a mass consumer vehicle, with the slogan ‘More Green for Less Green’: you could help the planet at a reasonable price.
This didn’t work. Electric vehicle sales didn’t reach explosive levels until Tesla changed the game. Tesla went for high-cost high-performance vehicles that looked and handled like sports cars. Electric vehicles became aspirational. They became sexy.
Tesla may be outcompeted by Chinese rivals. But BYD and Xpeng make cars in the mould created by Tesla, of sleek, performance oriented vehicles. A key advantage of electric vehicles is their rapid acceleration, and all major EV brands lean heavily into this in their marketing. Today, electric cars are diffusing into the market from the top, as an aspirational product that is becoming cheap enough to buy, rather than diffusing from the bottom (by competing on cost) or from the side (by appealing to climate-conscious consumers).
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Facebook? That’s just Friendster for college kids. Why would that catch on?
Because having an account that requires a Harvard (and then later any Ivy League) email address creates an aura of status and exclusivity. Everyone wanted to be on it, precisely because not just anybody could be on it. This fuelled Facebook’s explosive early growth and is part of the reason it ended up displacing Friendster.
Now, ‘Boomerbook’ has lost its cool, and the kids use other apps, such as Instagram. Instagram also followed a similar strategy, originally only being available on IOS and thus only to those who owned (more expensive) Apple products.
The takeaway
Moving from an exclusive, status-oriented and aspirational brand to a mass-market consumer product has been successfully used many times to achieve market dominance. Apple did it with the iPhone, Nike did it with Air Jordans, Starbucks did it with espresso coffee.
I think this is the way forward for cultivated meat. Just like electric vehicles have a key advantage in acceleration, cultivated meat has a key advantage in variety. With nothing but a scraping of cells, meat can be grown of any animal you like. Have you ever eaten quail? Turtle? Ostrich? These would normally be ruled out by accessibility, cost and ethical considerations. But with cultivated meat, no animals need be harmed, and growing something exotic is not much harder than growing chicken or pork. It might even be possible to create strange and new hybrids — kangaroo steak with added beef fat for marbling, or things even stranger and more novel still. We could even create meat of extinct animals, as long as we have samples of their cells.
These are not hypotheticals. This is the chosen strategy of a very promising Sydney-based cultivated meat company called Vow, who created mammoth meatballs as a publicity stunt (alas, as no one has eaten mammoth in thousands of years, food safety authorities couldn’t be sure it is safe to eat). Vow also offer cultivated quail in fine-dining restaurants in Singapore and Australia. They do not appeal to the ethical impulses of those who want to avoid meat, but the curiosity of culinary adventurers who go to expensive restaurants to eat entirely new flavours.
Hopefully in this way, the ‘ick’ factor of cultivated meat can be replaced with an aura of status. Cultivated meat is new, interesting, adventurous. It is a culinary delight, not a mass-produced substitute; a Wagyu steak, not a hamburger. I believe this is far more promising than those cultivated meat companies who emphasise similarity with farmed meat, especially those who are aiming below the current meat market by starting with cultivated pet food.
This also provides a promising way for cultivated meat to generate revenue while it comes down the cost curve. It remains more expensive than farmed meat, and buyers will need to pay a premium to eat it. Are they more likely to pay a premium for a novel fine-dining experience, or for pork-mince that has texture that is still not quite right? I think the answer is pretty clear.
