Post is a physiologist from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and heads the team that pioneered laboratory-grown beef, revealed to the world in London two years ago.
He said stem cells from bovine muscle could be harvested and cultured into strands of protein in seven weeks.
The feed conversion efficiency, using plant-sourced sugars, proteins and vitamins, was two to one compared with many times more for farmed livestock.
The demands of livestock farming on the environment, especially cattle, would drive the change to factory-scale alternatives, Post said.
The world’s population was expected to grow from seven billion to 9b by 2050 but the demand for meat would double as incomes improved.
That demand would not be satisfied by traditional livestock farming competing with much greater needs for arable land.
In 25 years cultured meat would have overwhelmed traditional livestock farming for meat production, whose farmers and meat companies could choose to collaborate or not.
Based on scaling up the research findings, he claimed the meat for 10,000 people could be grown in a plant the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
The university had launched a start-up company called Mosameat and Post said it was four or five years from having products to sell.
It was seeking 10m euros to prove cultured meat could be produced at scale.
In future, licences would be issued to outside manufacturers.
Projections of the technology, inputs and scale of manufacturing indicated cultured meat would need to sell for $65/kg.
He called the price “high but workable” and said prices would come down as large scale plants were built, something he put into a six to 10-year time frame.
“It does have the potential to replace your meat industry so I think you had better think about how it will impact your markets.”
Professor Mark Post
Maastricht University
But Post expressed several concerns with the meat from the new technology, including consumer resistance, the need for fat tissue, lack of steak-like structure and colour and lack of “emotion” or romance.
The cells grown in the laboratory did not self-organise into fibres with elasticity the way normal muscle cells developed and functioned, so that caused meat texture issues.
Post was questioned about the “yuck factor” that might have been less of a problem if research targeted a novel food instead of replicating an existing one.
Meat was already well known and accepted and consumers could be educated about the consequences of their meat eating, he replied.
More than half of Dutch and British people surveyed after the launch of his laboratory-grown hamburger said they would eat cultured meat.
He was also asked whether a hall full of New Zealanders who were meat consumers, some of them producers, and all of them dependent on an agricultural economy, should be worried.
“It is not going to happen overnight but it does have the potential to replace your meat industry so I think you had better think about how it will impact your markets.”
Post said he used the analogy of free-range eggs versus those from caged hens as a market change driven solely by animal welfare concerns.
