At the beginning of the new year, in areas worth paying attention to and may have significant development in 2022, " artificial meat " should gain a place.
In fact, this emerging industry has become a national "hot search".
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China talked about "future food manufacturing" and "cell culture meat" for the first time in the latest release of the "14th Five-Year Plan" National Agricultural and Rural Science and Technology Development Plan" (later referred to as " Agricultural Planning "), and listed this category as the area where the country actively participates in the next five years.
In other words, China is integrating this new food production method into the national food security plan, speeding up regulatory approval timetables, and promoting related investments.
This can be considered a big news for related industries.
The annual meat consumption per person in China has reached about 60 kilograms. The government has included "cell cultured meat" in the national plan, which means that this trillion-dollar market has been pried open a "gap" and the development prospects are self-evident.
2021 is called "the first year of Chinese artificial meat" by many Chinese media.
Many companies are waiting for an opportunity to move.
plant meat brand received three rounds of financing within 8 months on week and had an A+ round of financing of over 100 million yuan; other artificial meat brands Weishida, Green Monday, and Zhou Zi will all receive more than 10 million yuan in financing in the future; Shuangta Food, Jinzi Ham and other old meat products companies have also entered the market; the international artificial meat brand Beyond Meat announced that it will build a factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang; Australian plant meat brand V2 food also officially entered the Chinese market last year.
However, for ordinary Chinese consumers, I am afraid many people will have simple questions in their hearts:
"cell cultured meat" is real meat? Now that the meat supply is so sufficient, why should I buy "artificial meat"?
From this perspective, is it a long way to avoid "cell cultured meat" that is extremely experimental in the field of artificial meat?
What is artificial meat?
At the end of last year, when Grill’d, a well-known Australian burger chain, launched a plant meat burger with the American plant meat company Impossible Foods, we wrote an article to explain that
In short, it is people’s increasing demand for meat and the environmental pressure brought to the earth by the animal husbandry industry. This set of contradictions is difficult to reconcile. Further technological means are needed to solve the problem of “eating meat” for all mankind. Wei Ruihao, chief investment officer of
Bomanaocai, pointed out that even if the global population of 7 billion is predicted with extremely conservative data, that is, artificial meat replaces 5-10% of ordinary meat consumption in the next 10-20 years, this will be a trillion-dollar industry.
In China, the development of this industry is still relatively blank, which can explain why major capitals have been scrambling to the local market in the past or two years.
The "cell cultured meat" mentioned in this "Agricultural Plan" is a subdivision of artificial meat.
It must be pointed out that the imitation meat and vegetable meat made of traditional soy products that are familiar to the Chinese are not really artificial meat.
The so-called "artificial meat" is the "meat" obtained through other channels without the need to breed livestock and poultry. Its color, fragrance, taste, shape and nutrition are similar to meat, and can provide the protein that the human body needs.
According to raw materials, process, and nutritional characteristics, artificial meat can be divided into plant-based meat, mixed protein meat , bacterial protein meat and cell culture meat, etc. However, in essence, they are all artificial foods that replace livestock and poultry meat protein.
Strictly speaking, artificial meat is mainly divided into two categories:
The first category is plant meat. is extracted from soybeans, peas, wheat and other crops for processing, so that it has the taste and texture of animal meat products.
The second category is " test tube meat ", which is the "cell culture meat" referred to in the "Agricultural Planning". is made by extracting and cultivating animal stem cells in the laboratory to obtain products with the same taste and texture as traditional animal products.
Cell cultured meat: ideal and plump, realistic and skinny
From an investment perspective, the market prospects are broad, and the fields that require investment in technological development are still very attractive.
independent science and technology think tank RethinkX pointed out that China's support strategy is expected to become an accelerator for the industry, promoting the development and application of leading protein technologies such as cell engineering agriculture.
However, although cell cultured meat sounds very "high-tech", there are still three major problems that need to be broken through in actual development.
First of all, it is the technical bottleneck.
Due to the need to "cultivate" meat and fatty fiber technology from animal cells in bioreactor , it involves a large number of genetic engineering requirements, and the global overall cell culture technology is not yet mature.
The current cycle of cell culture meat from scratch is basically about 1 month. To achieve large-scale production, problems such as production capacity must still be solved.
In addition, cell culture meat may be the future development direction, but there are still cognitive and even ethical issues. As mentioned above, the most common question is: Can this "meat grown in a container" be considered real meat?
Moreover, various countries are still exploring the supervision of cell cultured meat:
The Singapore government has issued regulatory approval requirements for cell cultured meat products;
The products of Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) and BlueNalu, which are headquartered in the United States, did not receive a release approval from the US government last year;
In the European market, the regulatory approval of retail such products may also take until 2025.
Although the Chinese government has added "cell cultured meat" to the Agricultural Plan, specific management rules have not been issued yet.
Asia-Pacific market has great potential, and consumers are still waiting to "educate"
Compared with cell culture meat, plant meat technology and production chain are relatively mature.
Most of the artificial meat products that appear in the global market are based on plant meat.
, and all kinds of plant meat companies are actively developing Asian markets, including China.
This is mainly related to the population structure. Currently, Asia accounts for 7 of the 12 countries with a population of more than 100 million. By 2030, Asia may occupy as many as 17 of the 25 largest cities in the world.
population aggregation makes Asia more demanding for new and sustainable food production systems than other regions - this also provides a clear macro driver for the artificial meat industry.
For example, Australian plant meat brand V2 Food entered China in May last year. Before this, V2 Food had successfully developed New Zealand , Thailand, the Philippines, Japan and South Korea and other international markets.
In addition, Eat Just, a plant-based egg producer based in , California, , cooperated with Proterra to gain a foothold in the United States and also led the way in Asia.
However, the rush of capital and enterprises has not caused much trouble on the consumer side.
Take Beyond Meat, the world's first listed plant meat technology company, as an example. Although it entered the Chinese consumer market in July last year, it began to sell artificial burger meat patties through platforms such as Hema Fresh . But the sales are not satisfactory.
A consumer is selecting artificial meat products at the IBC store in Shenzhen Hema, picture/Shenzhen Business Daily
There are many reasons. Wei Ruihao believes that it can be roughly divided into four points:
First, Consumers are used to cognition: Chinese people have a long history of eating vegetarian food or plant products, such as drinking soy milk, eating vegetarian chicken , vegetarian duck, but most consumers' understanding of plant meat is still in the early stage, which is easy to be confused with traditional vegetarian food. It takes a process to form differentiated consumption of plant meat in the market, and it takes time to educate consumers in ;
Second, product technology: China has a deep food culture, and the taste of Beyond Meat plant meat is still lacking, making it difficult to meet the needs of Chinese diners with high requirements for food taste.
Third, Regulations and Supervision : China's plant-based industry standards and regulations have lag, and it will take some time to improve relevant regulations and edible labels.
fourth, price: many plant-based products are very expensive after they are launched. For example, when various discounts are used in the official store of Beyond Meat, the price of meat patties is about RMB 103 per kilogram (22 Australian dollars); while Tmall is mostly priced at 80-130 per kilogram. Although there are factors in this, the high overall cost of production to logistics is also a problem that the plant meat industry still needs to solve.
It can be said that the consumer education process, product taste adjustment, production chain maturation, and regulations improvement of are expected to take several years to complete the entire Chinese market.
In particular, how to improve the taste and taste of the product and further reduce production costs is a huge challenge facing the entire plant meat industry at present. Without solving these problems, it is hard to say that the meat that really replaces people's daily meals.
, and another plant meat company, Impossible Foods, has made some breakthroughs in this regard. Thanks to the development of hemoglobin extraction technology and sufficient plant protein molecules, the taste and taste of its products are closer to real meat.
company's leading advantage in the technology and its huge industrial development direction brought by the current global ESG (environmental protection, society, governance) are important reasons why Boman Aocai chose to participate in Impossible Foods last year.
Wei Ruihao believes that although artificial meat still needs to go through a series of processes such as consumer education, legal supervision implementation, and industrial scale in the short term, there are certain resistances to market development; but in the long run, just as the Chinese government has added cell culture meat to the agricultural plan, many institutional investors believe that artificial meat with low-carbon production and significantly reduced resource utilization "will definitely occupy a place on the human table" in the future, and plays an extremely important role in increasing the protein intake of people in some countries and regions.
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