International

May 27, 2025

For the first time, agricultural innovation may align with both the economics of venture capital and the urgency of supply disruption

April 25, 2025

Exiting a company is a milestone—but for mission-driven founders, it’s also a chance to rethink how they create change

April 22, 2025

In just four years, leading companies in the cultured meat sector have driven core production costs dramatically below what the Humbird TEA—and its surrounding media coverage—deemed possible.

December 19, 2023

Microalgae, those tiny organisms that thrive in water and sunlight, hold immense potential for addressing the world’s protein sustainability challenges. By tackling key cultivation bottlenecks and exploring alternative growth strategies such as mixotrophy, microalgae-based proteins may soon become more accessible to consumers, offering a valuable addition to our diets and food supply chains.

March 7, 2023

The general assumption is that technology is intrinsically neutral — it can be used for either good or bad and the outcome depends on the person or group who uses it. However, history has shown us time and again that this is not entirely true.

June 23, 2022

Chitin- and chitosan-based scaffolds show promise for improving both the scalability and nutritional value of cell-cultured meat products.

March 15, 2022

What options are on the food-tech menu for achieving long-term protein security? Cell culture, plants, microorganisms, algae, and fungi may all have roles to play. But from a sustainability and resilience perspective, is there a clear winner?

October 12, 2021

Seaweed is the collective noun for a group of at least 10,000 species of macroalgae, and new species are being discovered each year. Although seaweeds have been consumed for millennia, they’re increasingly (and rightly) viewed as a hero ingredient. With only half a dozen species cultivated at scale right now, seaweed’s potential for the alt-protein industry is only just starting to unfold.

August 11, 2021

“Many other industries use a linear model — take, make, use, and dispose — which is clearly unsustainable. Once a supply chain is established,” says New Harvest Research Fellow Dawne Skinner, “it is essentially locked in because it is too costly to reconfigure. Given that the cell-based industry is nascent, we are in the stage of initiating a new supply chain. My research aims to figure out how we can start this supply chain off on the right foot.”

July 6, 2021

Rarely do retail investors have the opportunity to gain exposure and access to a new technology this early. That’s partly because Agronomics — which bills itself as “a thematic investment play into the clean meat sector” — is one of the only publicly traded options available to those who see the potential in cell-cultured meat.

April 27, 2021

Although antibiotics are generally thought of in the context of treating infections within our healthcare systems, that’s not where most are actually used. Globally, around 73% of all antibiotics are used in animals grown for food.

February 1, 2021

Investor and author Jim Mellon talks one-on-one with Doug Grant, host of the Brave New Meat podcast, to discuss his new book, Moo’s Law, and the investment opportunity in cultivated meat.

January 20, 2021

The confluence of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the rapid development of new food technologies and the rising global demand for protein mean that we are on the cusp of a huge and profitable investment wave into new forms of agriculture. The greatest beneficiaries of this investment wave will be cultured and plant-based foods.

January 12, 2021

What I’ve learned through my first eleven Brave New Meat podcast interviews with founders and investors in the cultured meat industry

August 28, 2020

By optimizing culture media ingredients specifically for cultivated meat production, and by producing those ingredients at scale, costs may be reduced to as little as $0.24 per liter. This would enable cell-cultured meat produced in bioreactors to reach prices competitive with their animal-based counterparts. But investment and demand needed to reach those economies of scale remain a constraint on lowering cultivated meat production costs.

August 6, 2020

Cultured insect meat products might look more like normal burgers and steaks than you’d expect. But what is entomoculture, why might we need it, how does it work, and who’s leading the research? Prodigious young science writer and New Harvest summer intern, Avery Parkinson, answers all your questions.

May 14, 2020

It’s a sick and tragic sight. Across the US, dairy producers are currently dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk into fields and lagoons, as demand continues to plummet. It makes me think about the country’s more than 9 million dairy cows, forced to live out their highly unnatural lives, in dark, cramped milk-making prisons, often sick and in pain — just to keep pumping out a useless commodity. The same could be said of the US meat industry, which slaughters 9.59 billion land animals a year. To make matters worse, President Trump ordered slaughterhouses to stay open despite the clear danger to public health. This is something we can fix.

April 7, 2020

In an eponymous book published in 1968, Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich noted that the rate of population growth would outpace agricultural production, leading to widespread famine and subsequent suffering in the 1970s and 1980s. Many now look back at that prediction and shame it as another example of fear-mongering about a Malthusian catastrophe that has been often repeated throughout history but never come to pass. This post comes from my upcoming book, Cultivated Abundance, which will be published by New Degree Press in July 2020.