We can build it better than before: Building a new plant-based meat production system on the backs of 80 years of meat production technology
The modern-day global meat production system has been stressed to the limit by the coronavirus pandemic. John Tyson, Chairman of Tyson Foods, one of the largest meat production companies in the world, said it best in a recent advertisement: “The food supply chain is breaking.” In fact, there has never been a more dangerous time to be a meat producer. The risks of COVID-19 outbreaks are increased in meatpacking plants, which harbor the virus due to refrigerated, dry conditions and high density of workers. Getting life ‘back to normal’ may be all we want right now, but the status quo, especially in the meat supply chain, will only make things worse. If we want a pandemic-proof food system, we need to scale plant-based meat production.
The UN Environment Programme’s recent COVID-19 Response Report squarely identified increasing reliance on animal products as the largest threat for future, near term, and even potential pandemics that could overlap with the current one. Yet, epidemiological solutions to zoonotic diseases in humans (i.e. pandemics), such as those proposed by the UN Environment Programme, are simply stop-gap measures. It’s critical that we address our dependencies on domestic and wild animal sources of meat.
We needn’t blame these thought leaders for not questioning the ubiquity of meat production. UN leaders worry that decreasing the supply of wild animal meat will disproportionately impact the livelihoods of women in developing countries. Tyson Foods leaders claim a societal responsibility to put cheap meat on our nation’s tables in spite of the extreme risks. These sociological concerns range from laudable to strategic, but are primarily driven by a complete lack of better and, more importantly, immediately executable solutions to convert our meat production systems to safer production operations.
John Tyson brought it front and center that the meat processing show must go on. But there is a better way.
We don’t have to look that closely at meat production to find both the cause of pandemics in wild animal markets and factory farms of domestic animals and the exacerbation of pandemics.
Our meat processing facilities use the cumulative implementation of 80 years of increasingly sophisticated food production technology ranging from robotic carcass cutting machines in pork processing and automated decapitation machines in chicken processing to pre-formed beef burger presses and mechanized nugget making machines. Yet such facilities have many vulnerabilities, especially with respect to COVID-19. Most notably nearly all are refrigerated, low-moisture environments which happen to be the ideal setting for preserving the novel coronavirus in the air and on surfaces. To top it off, they’re staffed with large numbers of people working side-by-side.
The institution of meat production may seem from the outside to be unchangeable. It is not. If the problem with zoonotic pandemics is meat, then we need to deal with meat as a product first. For nearly five years, the global demand for meat alternatives, most notably plant-based meat, has grown dramatically and is touted as the most likely solution to drawing down our reliance on animal-based meat for health, climate change and animal welfare reasons. Why not also to prevent pandemics? Plant-based meat simply is not a scalable solution… yet.
By 2030, the market demand for plant-based meat will exceed $85B per year. Yet, production will only reach $20B — one quarter of the demand in the same time period. The US meat industry produces over 108B pounds of animal meat, and yet the cumulative plant-based meat industry only produces one-fifth of one percent of that volume.
The vast majority of people don’t have access to meat replacements because most meat still comes from animals, and most of our meat production facilities produce animal-meat instead of plant-based meat.
But a solution is at hand. At Rebellyous Foods, we are designing the next generation of food production equipment that allows us (and one-day other plant-based meat companies as well) to make plant-based meat at higher volumes, considerably lower costs, and in safe non-refrigerated warehouses. At Rebellyous, our new production system can be installed in a meat processing facility, for example one currently making chicken nuggets, by converting it into a plant-based meat production facility making that facility 2–3 times more productive than when it was a chicken production facility.
How do we prevent future pandemics? We convert meat processors into plant-based meat production facilities with new production technology bringing plant-based meat to the masses.
Christie Lagally is the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods, a plant-based chicken manufacturing and technology company based in Seattle, Wash.
