In 2016, the farm-animal protection nonprofit Mercy for Animals set aside $540,000 to help launch a new organization with a novel focus: the development of alternative food products that could beat animal agriculture at its own game.
The founding CEO of the new nonprofit, the Good Food Institute, was Bruce Friedrich, a former PETA vice president who in the late 1990s and 2000s was responsible for in-your-face activist campaigns like McCruelty and Murder King, which highlighted the treatment of animals on the menu at fast food chains.
But Friedrich wasn’t convinced that those efforts to raise awareness had done much to change consumer behavior. He saw potential in young companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, which promised new choices for meat eaters through plant-based foods that would mimic the taste and texture of the real thing without the environmental harms. So he shifted to a market-focused approach to change the way we eat.
“Trying to convince the world to eat less or no meat has tremendous value, but it hasn’t changed the upward trajectory of industrial animal-meat production and consumption,” says Friedrich, who is now the organization’s president.
Good Food Institute was built as a think tank and advocacy organization that could jump-start an entire food category that includes both plant-based meat, dairy, and egg substitutes — as well as cultured or lab-grown products that use real animal cells to grow meat or seafood in a lab setting.
It’s a vision of the future of food that philanthropy has helped shape from the ground up. Standard-bearers of the effective altruism movement, like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, have supported the cause as a way to reduce harm to animals on factory farms through their Open Philanthropy Project. More recently, climate-focused grant makers like the Bezos Earth Fund are exploring the role alternative proteins could play in reducing the environmental impact of animal agriculture, which accounts for at least 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Advocates draw parallels between alternative meat and renewable-energy technology, saying that dollars from governments, along with philanthropy, are critical if these food products are to ever become more than a niche product.
“If we leave this to the tender mercies of the private sector, we’re not going to have very many products, and it’s going to take a really long time,” Friedrich says.
Good Food Institute and the products it evangelizes have also faced backlash. The meat industry has pushed laws to try to handicap alternative-protein companies by restricting the use of terms like “milk” or “meat” on food labels, even as the biggest meat companies enter the industry themselves.
At the same time, some advocates for plant-based diets argue that highly processed biotech foods may be a stop-gap measure but not the answer to climate challenges. Even within the alternative-meat research world, some scientists are skeptical that products like lab-grown fillets can ever be produced at a cost and scale to make a dent in the world’s growing appetite for meat.
At a recent Good Food Institute gathering, as alt-meat boosters and entrepreneurs mingled over faux-chicken Caesar salads and plant-based beef jerky, there was recognition that future success isn’t inevitable.
Today the industry faces turmoil following years of hype. U.S. sales of alternative meat more than doubled between 2017 and 2020, but have since leveled off, even after the eye-popping initial public offering for Beyond Meat in May 2019. More than a dozen startups working on products like eggless eggs and vegan bacon have failed in recent months. Venture capital funding has been harder to come by. And some of the biggest companies, like Upside Foods, the billion-dollar lab-grown meat startup that received USDA approval earlier this year to sell cuts of chicken cultivated with real animal cells, are struggling to deliver on their promise of large-scale production.
The rise of the new alt-meat movement demonstrated philanthropy’s ability to conjure up an industry from the ground up. The challenge now is whether philanthropy can help sustain it.
Changing Diets, Changing Culture
Leah Garces, CEO of Mercy for Animals, which provided the seed funding for Good Food Institute’s launch, says the group has been incredibly successful in a short time.
As the industry has grown, so has the Good Food Institute: Its revenue has skyrocketed from around $2.9 million in 2016 to almost $43 million in 2021. About 26 percent of that support has been awarded by foundations, and about 61 percent has come from individuals making annual gifts of $25,000 or more. The group now has 200 staff, about half in the U.S. and the rest working for international affiliates in Brazil, Israel, India, Singapore, and Europe. Their work focuses on supporting scientific research and development, influencing policy, and encouraging governments to increase spending on alternative meat, and helping to nurture a community of food-tech startups.
“They’re shaping the development of a product that will be hopefully core to what we eat and how we live,” Garces says, “but if nobody buys them, who cares?“
Garces argues that without cultural change around eating habits, the alternative-meat industry will not be successful. And for that reason, Mercy for Animals continues to work on the demand side to make it easier for consumers to cut back on eating animal products.
Mercy for Animals is pushing for plant-based entrees to be offered in places like college dining halls and encouraging restaurants to swap out animal ingredients for plant-based alternatives in baked goods, dressings, and sauces.
“We are essentially like a giant marketing agency for all of these products,” she says.
The biggest hurdle for consumers, and a reason why plant-based companies are struggling right now, is cost, says Friedrich. Beyond and Impossible burgers still cost about twice as much as the ground beef they imitate, he says, but “assuming we can get to price parity, it will not be difficult to sell.”
Good Food Institute leaders are adamant that their organization is not a meat-reduction organization or even a vegan or vegetarian organization.
“We’re not asking people to give up the food they love,” says Ilya Sheyman, Good Food Institute’s CEO. “The question is: How do you provide the meat people love in different ways? Are we offering consumers an alternative to conventionally sourced meat?”
‘The Electric Vehicles of Food’
Friedrich has compared the possible trajectory of this food category to electric vehicles and solar panels — products that were expensive and inefficient until policy changes accelerated their development. “Tesla would have failed at least once, if not for [Department of Energy] loans,” Friedrich says. “Alternative proteins are basically the electric vehicles of food.”
”We essentially see alternative proteins as climate tech,” says Andy Jarvis, who directs the Future of Food program at the Bezos Earth Fund. “It has enormous potential if it really does scale not only to address climate issues, but also to nature issues” because of the amount of land used for livestock.
In February, the fund awarded Good Food Institute $5.5 million to support research and future planning.
Jarvis does not expect seismic shifts in the food system to happen overnight. “This whole market is not going to flip within a decade,” he says, and investors “weren’t as aware as they should have been that this is a long transition.”
During climate week in New York, a series of environmental events that overlapped with the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September, Bezos Earth Fund CEO Andrew Steer hosted a lunch conversation with staff from big green NGOs, top climate philanthropies, and half a dozen governments, including representatives from the USDA and the United Arab Emirates. Over a meal featuring cuts of cultivated chicken, the group discussed the potential of sustainable proteins to help address climate change, food security, and economic growth
Jarvis says philanthropy’s real power lies in its ability to signal what’s important, both to governments and other donors. “Support from philanthropy can send the message that this is an area that needs to be looked at and nurtured and supported,” he says.
While support from global governments doubled in the past year, the $635 million contributed in 2022 is a far cry from what may be required. Modeling by the management consultancy McKinsey & Company for ClimateWorks Foundation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, projects that if alternative proteins are to reach 50 percent of market share by 2050, governments will need to invest $4.4 billion annually in research and development and $5.7 billion annually in private sector incentives.
Open Philanthropy’s Role in the Rise of Meatless Meat
The biggest driver of factory farming has been the world’s increasing demand for meat. That demand is expected to more than double by 2050, as global population and incomes continue to grow. Under that scenario, meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels this century is virtually impossible.
Meat contributes to climate change throughout its supply chain. Increased demand will require additional land for feed and livestock, resulting in more deforestation. Emissions of methane and other greenhouse gasses produced by cattle and other animals will continue to rise. And more fossil fuels will be burnt to produce fertilizers used on feed crops like corn.
“We see alternative proteins as one exciting opportunity to offset future increases in protein consumption that would otherwise drive the increase in factory farming,” says Lewis Bollard, who directs the farm-animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy.
Open Philanthropy, an effective-altruism grant maker and research organization, funded by Moskovitz and Tuna, has disclosed more than $17 million in grants to advance alternatives to animal products. That represents around 14 percent of grant making from Open Philanthropy’s farm-animal welfare program.
In 2017, Open Philanthropy made an investment in Impossible Foods, which makes the Impossible Burger, but did not disclose the size of the investment. That was a one-off impact investment, Bollard says.
Subsequent support has gone to groups like the Good Food Institute and the Plant Based Foods Association, which focus on gaps private investors aren’t interested in filling. That includes communications and advocacy against the meat industry’s efforts to censor food labels as well as urging regulators to approve sales of cultivated meat products.
“Each of the startups on their own has been too small and too focused on getting their own products to market to take on those policy challenges,” Bollard says. “We’ve seen philanthropy be able to have a really important role in pushing back against some of those attacks from the meat industry.”
To be sure, some philanthropic donors continue to turn to mission-related investing to back alternative-protein startups. Take Satish Karandikar, a major animal welfare donor and investor, who recently provided $16 million in new capital to the cultivated-chicken and plant-based egg company Eat Just through his Ahimsa Foundation.
Many donors also invest in food companies they believe will have impact, says David Meyer, CEO of Food System Innovations, a nonprofit that makes grants and advises other donors on how to reduce reliance on animal products.
“In most cases,” he wrote in an email, these investors “have said that any profits they ever realize will be funneled back into philanthropy (or further impact investment in the space).”
Good Food Institute Research Grants
Since 2019, the Good Food Institute has awarded more than $13 million in research grants of up to $250,000 to scientists in 18 countries. The nonprofit estimates those grants have helped spark about $16.9 million in follow-on grant dollars from governments.
That was the case for Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who in 2019 received a $250,000 Good Food Institute grant for a project that aimed to replicate cuts of beef in a lab setting with marbling, the layers of muscle and fat that add flavor and juiciness during cooking.
That initial funding enabled her lab to receive $600,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture, $1 million from the National Science Foundation, and part of a $5 million grant from the state of California to fund cultivated-meat research in the University of California system.
California is the first U.S. state to back animal meat grown in a lab, and while federal support has increased, the total number of grants and grant dollars remains low.
Proprietary research conducted by companies has limited benefit to the sector as a whole, says Sheyman, Good Food Institute’s CEO. “The ability to have open-access science and open-access knowledge sharing, that’s what enables the whole field to succeed.”
What Lies Ahead for the Meatless-Meat Movement?
In 2018, Open Philanthropy commissioned a study on the potential of producing cultivated meat at scale. In the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, the report’s author, David Humbird, a chemical-engineering consultant, concluded that cell-cultured meat will face extreme economic and technical challenges that could prevent it from measurably displacing consumption of conventional meat.
Bollard, with Open Philanthropy, said the report did not temper but rather influenced his organization’s further grant making. He said it left them particularly excited to support approaches that face fewer technical hurdles, like plant-based products and those produced through fermentation. Still, Open Philanthropy hasn’t given up on grants to support cultivated, or lab-grown, animal meat, but it’s focused on getting the government to fund research and development of those products.
Good Food Institute remains bullish on the future of lab-grown meat, though the group acknowledges that the sector still has miles to go.
At Good Food Institute’s September conference, hundreds of enthusiastic scientists, students, investors, and food-startup founders gathered in San Francisco to discuss issues like the climate and nutritional benefits of plant-based and lab-grown meat.
Mark Post, who in 2011 developed the first cell-cultured burger at a cost of around $325,000, spoke on a panel. A lot has been achieved since then, Post said, but there’s a long road ahead to be able to produce appealing meat from animal cells at a scale and cost that can feed a substantial amount of people.
“We are just really, in my mind, at the beginning,” Post told the crowd.
Some scientists working in the field remain skeptical about the future of cultivated meat.
Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt: Meat Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, believes Good Food Institute has leaned more on wishful thinking than on a foundation of science. San Martin’s lab has received grants from both the Good Food Institute and Open Philanthropy, along with the state of California.
He says that when the Good Food Institute releases a statistic or a report, “we take it with a grain of salt.”
“When you’re fully persuaded of something, you become a fanatic,” he says. “A biased institution doesn’t serve the industry very well.”
Attendees of the San Francisco gathering nibbled on salads topped with faux-lamb meatballs and “carne asada” bowls featuring mushroom-based steak. These people are alt-meat’s cheerleaders, but a cloud of uncertainty hung in the air, given that some companies are struggling, and sales of some products are waning.
There was lots of talk about a future where alternative proteins will no longer be an alternative, but rather more mainstream. Will that day come? And if so, when?
In 2022, plant-based meat represented a mere 2.5 percent of the packaged meat sales in the U.S., according to data from market research firm SPINS.
For Jarvis, with the Bezos Earth Fund, an ideal scenario involves alternative proteins capturing 10 percent of the share of the meat market within a decade.
“The fact of the matter, unfortunately, is even if you achieve that, it means you’re just standing still, because animal-food demand is going up at a rate higher than the growth of alternative proteins,” he says. “Too much hyperbole is not actually healthy. … The sector needs to be honest with itself about what can be achieved.”
Sheyman, the Good Food Institute CEO, is hopeful that alt-proteins will have their breakthrough moment. The question is when.
“Once you solve the technical challenges, once you get to a place where these products taste as good as conventionally created meat, where they’re as affordable, where they’re as good for you, it will be possible to rapidly scale up market share,” he says. “As we’ve seen in other industries, tipping points are possible.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
