Technical minded people might want to skip the popular article and go straight to the Open Philanthropy analysis: https://engrxiv.org/795su
The punchline: muscle cells are much more fragile than yeast, don't grow as fast, and need more expensive feedstocks. The bioreactors have to be smaller and run much longer, making them vulnerable to bacterial contamination. You'll never get to the price of commercially produced bulk yeast, because muscle isn't yeast.
You could imagine tweaking the temp range and growth rate with genetic engineering or adding in an immune system. But now you're talking about decades of investment, not years.
All I'm hearing is "there are some technical challenges". Of course there are. Keeping things sterile is basically not impossible. Nature is full of animals that figured out how to keep bacteria from rotting their bodies while they are still using them.
The conclusion related to cost is based on a very narrow understanding of the problem space and is only true if you stick with the article's assumptions and presumptions.
Future Meat Technologies apparently launched a facility that produces about 500 kilo of meat per day. That company has raised close to 46 million (according to Crunchbase). They are clearly still figuring a few things out. But you could see that scale a bit. From there it is just running the kilo price of meat against that and you can calculate revenue. Lets take beef for example. The kilo price of beef would be around 10$. So this facility produces about 5K worth of beef per day. Or about 1.8M per year. It's obviously a small research facility and not some mega facility. But it's been built by a company that invented the technology to do this and that then built this first factory. All on a budget of at most 50M$. I assume they've had a few false starts and that most of that budget went into R&D rather than building the factory that is alledgedly doing this. So, that factory is a lot cheaper than 50M$ probably.
This author says its never happening and Future Meat Technologies is launching their products in the US market next year. That can't both be true.
Add economies of scale, learning effects, etc. to the mix, and you get to quite profitable state quite soon. E.g. a facility that produces a few thousand kilos of beef per day selling it at 10$ per kilo, would be earning back Future Meat Technologies' investment to date every year. Doesn't sound that far fetched to me based on what they are already doing. The only questions are what would each facility cost to make and what would the running cost be for these facilities in terms of staffing and resources. This sounds to me like it's millions rather than billions.
The only thing they really mention about antibiotics is that "in the absence of antibiotics,78 a cell-culture bioreactor will readily harbor and be overcome by the contaminating microbe, which proliferate much faster than animal cells"
So, why not just spike the media with penstrep like everyone currently culturing animal cells in the lab for the past three or four decades at least?
There are also other parts of this where it seems like they are comparing technologies in the context of where they are today in the small scale cell culture world (of mililiter amounts) where everything plastic is sold for 100x what it costs Fisher or VWR to make since its government monopoly grant money that is being spent anyhow. If a company wanted to do retention filtering at scale they can do it for much cheaper than what it costs today for researchers working cell culture in academic labs.
The punchline: muscle cells are much more fragile than yeast, don't grow as fast, and need more expensive feedstocks. The bioreactors have to be smaller and run much longer, making them vulnerable to bacterial contamination. You'll never get to the price of commercially produced bulk yeast, because muscle isn't yeast.
You could imagine tweaking the temp range and growth rate with genetic engineering or adding in an immune system. But now you're talking about decades of investment, not years.