SCiFi Foods, a startup backed by the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is using a gene editing technology, CRISPR, to cultivate beef outside of the cow. 

The mission is to create an affordable and environmentally sustainable way to eat beef.

The founder and chief executive of SCiFi Foods, Joshua March, doesn’t think the best way to save the planet is to transform human behavior. He’d rather use technology. 

“I’ve always had the general philosophy that it’s easier to change technology than change people,” he says. “You can bang on about the environmental impact of beef all you want,” he adds, “but the vast majority of people are not actually becoming vegetarians.” 

“The market data very clearly backs that up,” he says. “Even if people are philosophically aligned with wanting there to be less beef or less cattle, they’re simply not going to pay more for something that tastes worse.”

Therefore, he says, the thing to do is to “figure out a better way of giving people what they want and use science and technology to do that… If we can figure out how to grow real meat, without the need for an animal, we can produce meat in a way that doesn’t have all of the costs and the downside that industrial agriculture has today.” 

That’s precisely what he is doing. 

Mr. March says he first got the idea for cultivated beef 15 years ago when he read “Player of Games,” a science fiction book by Iain Banks, an author who is also a favorite of Elon Musk. Mr. March hasn’t been able to stop thinking of it since.

The novel, written in the 1980s, isn’t about cultivating meat: It simply mentions at one point that all of the meat is grown in tanks instead of coming from animals. 

“As soon as I read that one line,” Mr. March says, “it just seemed very apparent to me that it must be the future we build.” 

“I love burgers,” he says, “but I also believe that the current methods of production simply are not sustainable for the planet.” 

According to Mr. March, “Beef is extremely inefficient in terms of actual calories in to calories out, potentially as low as 3 percent efficiency given the resources required to feed the cow, compared to how much of it you actually eat.”

He adds: “Beef production has major land use issues. Globally, 80 percent of rainforest deforestation is either for pasture or to grow crops to feed cattle and other animals. This means massive amounts of crop land that could otherwise be used productively for humans or just left alone as a rainforest is now being converted to grow crops to feed animals.” 

 Mr. March continues, “Cows also emit a huge amount of methane because of their digestion processes, and methane is the most destructive of all greenhouse gasses.” That said, he adds, “the only good thing about methane is that it lasts less than other gasses [10 years], so if you can cut back on it, you can have a really positive impact in a very short timeframe.”

On top of those core issues, he says, “massive antibiotic usage in cattle is creating widespread antibiotic resistant bugs, creating issues for humans as we run out of ways to treat our own illnesses.” Mr. March says more than 70 percent of beef is raised in factory farms.

In short, he states, “it just seemed clear to me that this can’t be the future. There must be a better way of doing it. And I’ve been obsessed about it ever since reading Iain’s book.” 

Although others have tried, and failed, to grow beef cells outside of the cow itself at any reasonable price, using CRISPR has enabled SCiFi Foods to optimize the way that our cells behave so that they can be grown cheaply at scale.

Cells need sugars, amino acids, fat, and other basic inputs that any life needs, he explains. However, “generally cells will only grow if they’re getting signals from the body telling them to grow. And those signals come in the form of these very complex proteins called growth factors.” 

“Growth factors,” he continues, “are one of the biggest hurdles in the cost of cultivated meat because making these growth factors is really, really expensive.” 

By using CRISPR, his team has been able to make “some tiny tweaks that tell the cell to grow even when those growth factors aren’t present,” drastically reducing the cost and making it affordable as a product that people can eat. 

Whereas in the past, people were making a steak in a lab for half a million dollars, Mr. March believes he will be able to bring his burgers to market for $1 apiece in time. 

To be clear, SCiFi Foods isn’t growing meat that looks like the steak we buy at the grocery store. Being able to do that at a reasonable price is a long way off. 

Rather, he has figured out how to grow individual meat cells, efficiently, at scale. SCiFi Foods will then add those meat cells to plant-based meat to create a product that actually tastes like real meat because it is meat. 

That, he says, solves “the biggest problem in plant-based meat today, which is basically taste. You just can’t replicate the full taste of meat just using only plant-based ingredients.”