Cultivated meat: how much of the market can it win?

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cultivated meat — real animal protein grown from cells, with no animal raised or slaughtered — could one day share a shelf with ordinary meat. Whether it wins a meaningful slice of that shelf comes down to a very human chain, and this model walks it in three open, fully-sourced steps:

Cost → price. Add up what a kilogram costs to grow (mostly the liquid medium the cells feed on, plus the cost of running the reactor), apply a retail markup, and divide by the price of the ordinary meat beside it. That ratio drives everything downstream.
Price → share. A two-segment, four-product multinomial logit (McFadden’s random-utility theory, with a Berry–Levinsohn–Pakes price term) puts cultivated on a shelf with conventional meat, plant-based meat, and a beans/skip-meat option. Each shopper weighs price, taste, animal welfare, and authenticity. Because cultivated meat is real animal tissue, it competes head-to-head with beef — drawing buyers from conventional meat, not from the plant-based aisle.
Share → over time. The long-run share is the destination; a Bass-diffusion layer shows adoption climbing toward it from a cold ~5% start, as familiarity grows.

Every assumption is exposed as a labelled slider, with the measured numbers pinned and the judgement calls swept in a Monte Carlo uncertainty band — nothing hidden. The interactive explorer lets you drag any slider — medium cost, reactor scale, retail markup, consumer acceptance — and watch market share, price ratio, and penetration respond instantly.

Food & biotech | Pablo Moreno

Cultivated meat: how much of the market can it win?