Nov 19, 2020
Indian cell-based food technology firm ‘Clear Meat’ is putting its effort to develop cell-based chicken mince due to the ‘multi-acceptability’ as the chicken is eaten by nearly all in India – even those who relish fish or mutton or other meats.
Dr. Siddharth Manvati, Co-founder, Clear Meat stated that though the tech that can be applied for various different types of meats, the firm has opted to start with a focus on minced chicken due to the ‘multi-acceptability’ of this product.
Also chicken is much cheaper meat; the market price of a whole chicken in India is around Rs. 250 per kg and processed chicken is about Rs.1000 per kg.
“Since we’re working on chicken mince, we’ve targeted the latter and have actually reached this at around Rs.800 to Rs.850 per kg – though we still want to bring it down more”, he said.
India consumers are now trying new products, and research has shown that actually only 27% of the population is really hardcore vegetarian so there really is a very enormous market here. So it is deduced that this enormous market is also apparently quite open to cell-based meats as an option – unlike in China which is not expected to open up to this quite so soon despite being a big meat-consuming nation, Dr. Manvati said that India is more willing to give it a shot.
People link lab-grown to GMO usually but as India is a non-GMO country so this becomes easier to convince that lab meats are non-GMO. That’s one of the main reasons clear meat just focusing on one product and also just in India for now, as it wants to use chicken mince as a trial and understands whatever impact and backlash come out of it.
The response to cell-based products is likely to be very different to that of plant-based, and face very different challenges as well. The plant-based products have already been facing backlash globally when it comes to nomenclature before the debate came to India, and this is because these products/ingredients have been around for a while and the regulators are concerned about consumers misinterpreting these.
For cell-based animal products – the main concern is whether it is GMO or not, antibiotic-free or not, shelf-life and impacts as it is a completely new sort of sector.
Clear Meat is now working towards sourcing more funding to scale-up and industrialize its setup, something which was somewhat delayed due to the onset of COVID-19. Although the main product focus, for now, is still chicken mince, the firm is also looking at new product lines covering more types of chicken products as well as other cell types.