Winner Winner Chicken(less) Dinner

This past July, Breakthrough’s Dan Blaustein-Rejto took on the role of judging innovative meat alternatives as part of the final stage of the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition. The multi-year contest, primarily sponsored by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, seeks to promote development of chicken breast or fish filet alternatives that rival the conventional versions in taste, texture, versatility, nutrition, and cost, but with lower environmental and animal welfare impacts. Meat alternatives can be divided into three categories—plant-based, cell-based, and fermentation-derived—each of which was represented among the six finalist teams, who were selected from a large pool of teams from around the world.

The XPRIZE competition is unique, but certainly not the first contest to foster change for the food industry.

In 1948, Howard Pierce of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), with support from the USDA, commissioned a contest dubbed “The Chicken of Tomorrow.” The goal of this public-private partnership approach was to make chicken cheaper and more appealing to a red-meat-loving post-WWII America. The multi-year, multi-round contest rallied farmers across America to breed the perfect broiler chicken, one that grew faster, required less feed, and possessed larger, meatier breasts and thighs. They speculated that if a chicken breast could rival the thickness of a steak, it may help chicken sales from plummeting after beef rationing ended.

The chicken Americans eat today descends from the winning bird— a cross between a California Cornish male and a New Hampshire female. This bird grew to an impressive four pounds in just twelve weeks, twice the size of the average bird at the time. To be fair, it took another decade, along with improvements in areas like feed and antibiotics, to reduce costs enough to render chicken the most widely consumed protein in America today. However, the “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest incentivized thousands of farmers to ramp up crossbreeding that may have otherwise taken tens or hundreds of years, or never occurred at all.

The “Chicken of Tomorrow” and the improvements in the years that followed led to chicken prices falling in the 1960s, but also had some unintended consequences. Issues related to meat production include zoonotic disease epidemic concerns, worker treatment, and animal welfare. While many of these concerns persist today, global consumption of meat, especially poultry and fish, continues to rise. With animal agriculture contributing about 11–17% of global greenhouse gas emissions and global demand for meat expected to rise about 12% by 2033, we need new breakthroughs to address animal agriculture’s negative externalities, including new technologies to meet emissions reduction targets.

While today’s chickens share traits with 1951’s winning “Chicken of Tomorrow,” 2024’s XPRIZE winner may not contain much chicken (or fish) at all. The fact remains that issues with taste, texture, price, and availability all contribute to alternative meat products' failure to significantly disrupt the market. The Good Food Institute found that 51% of polled consumers cited taste as the main reason they avoided or failed to repurchase plant-based meat products. Furthermore, a conventional chicken breast costs an average of $4.05 per pound as of June 2024, compared with the plant-based Daring chicken pieces at $12.64 per pound. Although meat substitutes still have a long way to go before they can feasibly compete with their conventional counterparts, replacing some of the market could be beneficial for the environment. Plant-based meat substitutes are 82 percent less land-intensive than conventional chicken and can reduce overfishing, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. While the environmental impact of cell-cultivated meat can be greater than that of conventional fish or chicken, production advancements and a switch to lower-carbon energy sources could reduce the effects.

It remains unclear whether meat substitutes will ever reach the scale needed to contend with conventional meat, but doing so will require substantial public investments-funding that private sectors are unlikely to fulfill alone.

After peak interest in 2022, alternative protein sales plateaued and fell in 2023, and such market fluctuations may scare off future venture capital. Research, development, and deployment funding will prove consequential for plant-based meats to scale beyond holding 0.9% of the current U.S. protein market. Unfortunately, U.S. public investment in plant-based meat substitutes lags behind major competitors such as Europe and Canada. In fact, public funding for all agricultural research and development in the U.S. is disproportionately low relative to the sector's emissions. We need increased investments across many areas of agricultural research and development, including for meat substitutes, to produce innovations necessary to substantially reduce the sector’s environmental impact.

In post-war America, chicken needed a serious upgrade to beat beef and pork and gain market share. The Chicken of Tomorrow succeeded in giving poultry the consumer appeal it needed and assisted in lowering production costs down the line. It exemplified a multifaceted approach to tackling gaps in innovation: combining public/private partnerships, marketing, and competition. Today, contests like the XPRIZE can do the same to encourage competitiveness and incentivize speedy innovation.