Yea, I definitely think SCP (quorn) or other plant based proteins are the way forward. Tbh I don’t see why we can’t just eat lentils, they’re pretty tasty. Even precision fermentation I think is just unnecessarily complicated to produce foodstuffs.

In terms of funding, I think there won’t be any more big funding rounds for CM companies, recently there were some in the region of 10m USD, but others have failed to get as much as they wanted. I think the investors now want to sit and wait a bit longer. Regulatory approval is slowly appearing now, but I am certain the costs are still nowhere near low enough. I know several big facilities are either being planned or are being built, but there is still a large amount of basic research that needs to be done before we get close to reasonable costs. Personally I don’t see how we can get over the problem of needing to grow terminally differentiated cells at scale. If the recession in the west carries on, I can see investors being unwilling to top up these companies when they start to run out of cash. The end product is not meant to be something super profitable anyway, it’s meant to be food.

In terms of investment around the globe, I would say the US has the largest single investments, I remember a few companies with 9 figure total funding, notable other places are Singapore, Israel, Australia, UK and a few in western Europe (france, Germany, Belgium). Several of the larger companies are not based in Israel or Singapore but are going there to open production facilities because those countries have well developed bioprocess experience and infrastructure. As for the intelligence of these investments, personally I believe spending probably nearly 1bn usd total on trying to grow some muscle cells in a tank when we could just eat less meat a bit nonsensical. But they’re currently paying my wage, so as long as those investors want to keep throwing money away, I’ll take it, whilst I try and look for something I personally find more impactful.