$1 million prize for commercial in vitro meat

There is news related to my articles on industry progress towards meat produced by stem cells in factories with a goal of ground meat products for supermarkets within 5 years.

UPDATE: H/T to Onsingularity.com

The PETA prize is meaningless because the winner has to be selling their invitro grown meat in 10 states and it must taste test as indistinguishable from real chicken when cooked into fried chicken.

Chicken is a $50 billion retail revenue a year industry in 2004 in the United States

Average per store sales are $500,000 to 1.2 million (the link is to 1992 sales figures and per store sales have been increasing.)

KFC had $12.2 billion in store sales in 2004

So the $1 million prize is about one hundredth of one percent of the industries profit or one five hundreds of one percent of annual revenues.

KFC alone sells $1 million worth of fried chicken in about 5 minutes. (Assuming stores are open 365 days per year and open for an average of 12 hours every day.)

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has announced a $1 million prize to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

A founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, said she had been hoping to get the organization involved in advancing in vitro meat technology for at least a decade.

But, Ms. Newkirk said, the decision to sponsor a prize caused “a near civil war in our office,” since so many PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed. Ms. Newkirk said the disagreement was natural, adding, “We will have members leave us over this.”

The Netherlands has put $5 million into in vitro meat studies.

As seen by the in vitro meat conference there is a lot of work in academia and ni the food industry already for in vitro (aka test tube meat aka meat factories.)

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