Skip to main content

Deck.blue brings a TweetDeck experience to Bluesky users

With over 3 million users and plans to open up more broadly in the months ahead, Bluesky is still establishing itself as an alternative to Twitter/X. However, that hasn’t stopped the developer community from embracing the project and building tools to meet the needs of those fleeing the now Elon Musk-owned social network, formerly known […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/TBbEAPF

The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/jm2KUbe

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nimbus launches tiny EV prototype that’s like a motorbike with a roof

As shared e-scooter companies have infiltrated cities and e-bike sales have soared, micromobility has been offered up as a panacea to save us all from the ill humors and packed streets caused by gas-guzzling cars. However, one of the major roadblocks in front of well-intentioned city dwellers who’d love to trade in their cumbersome and environmentally unfriendly vehicles for an e-bike or scooter remains: What happens when it rains? Nimbus, a California-based electric vehicle startup, wants to solve that problem with a simple solution: Put a roof on it. The company recently came out of stealth with a prototype for its Nimbus One, a tiny, three-wheeled EV that “combines the convenience and cost of a motorbike with the safety and comfort of a car.” The Nimbus One. Image Credits: Nimbus The thin, pod-like vehicle is only about 2.75 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, which Nimbus says makes it three to five times smaller than a compact car — the better to park and navigate busy urban stree...

Ivella is the latest fintech focused on couples banking, with a twist

Money can make people moody. There are layers of privilege, or lack thereof, that can make even the simplest conversation about bills feel like baggage to deal with. Translate that discomfort to relationships and it can feel like an awkward — and fragmented — dance on who pays which bill when (and how). Ivella , a Santa Monica-based startup, wants to build banking products for couples to take away some of these tensions. Led by CEO and co-founder Kahlil Lalji , the startup is launching with a split account product that just raised $3.5 million in funding from Anthemis, Financial Venture Studio and Soma Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia. Lalji, who helped creators with digital content before jumping into the world of fintech, says that the startup was born out of his own frustration at the expectation that couples would just use Venmo unless they were married. The best solution, so far, has been joint accounts...

Multifamily housing has missed the solar boom. PearlX wants to fix that with $70M Series B

If you’re a renter and you want solar power, you’re usually out of luck. For most, the only option is a community solar program, where people subscribe to utility-scale projects, but they’re not available everywhere. And given that most renters only stay for a few years, which of them are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for solar panels — and what landlord would let them? That’s where PearlX comes in. “Think of us as like the Sunrun for renters,” said co-founder and CEO Michael Huerta, referring to the company that rents solar installations to single-family homeowners. “PearlX is a rental electrification platform.” Earlier this year, the startup began installing solar panels and backup batteries at multifamily rentals in Texas as part of its “TexFlex” project. PearlX’s next step, which Huerta shared exclusively with TechCrunch, will be a California expansion called “Flexifornia.” The startup is also rolling out a virtual power plant, which will allow the company to tap the...