The costs are still too high for commercial viability but they're dropping rapidly. In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g by 2021, which would be cost competitive.
2 cents per gram translates to $9.07 per pound of Memphis Meats' cost. Assuming they skip the distributors (unlikely) and sell straight to retailers, it will be easily double that at the retail level, $18.14 per pound. They are more likely to end up around the $25-30 per pound price point at retail once all is said and done.
That's starting to wander into dry-aged beef ribeye territory at a higher-end version of common grocery chains, and sale pricing numbers at Whole Foods Market. It predictably starts out as a luxury good, but as others have noted, cell culture-based processes have historically scaled pretty effectively. So probably 2-3 more decades after that with continuous refinements will bring it down to a price point that even the middle class will look at, so that's pretty exciting it is getting so close.
What is the regulatory outlook for these products? Will they be regulated as pharmaceutical (due to the bioreactor origin) or food, or is this an issue currently being negotiated and discussed with government? I imagine investors would strongly prefer a food regulatory treatment.
You're absolutely right on the pricing and go to market strategy.
The regulatory frameworks are still up in the air. I know from having attending the 1st and 2nd Cultured Meat Symposiums in Maastricht that both the USDA and the FDA are looking at clean meat. While both agencies seem pretty open and friendly towards it, they unfortunately both think they should be the one to regulate it :-)
