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Algae as a surprising meat alternative and source of environmentally friendly protein
(www.worldhealth.net)
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Keeping things sterile is very labour and energy intensive, even in the Pharma industry, where the profit margins are orders of magnitude above what you can do in the food industry.
Look this will sound harsh, but it's not, really.
Your reasoning is good if you compare it to an hypothesis a student of Pasteur or Koch could have thought of 150 yrs ago.
Thus I have to ask you, why did you think you have a good take on this?
Did you read what i wrote? i said "take inspiration from" not "should copy 1:1 also i work i pharma so yes i have a good take on this.
When you're working with coproducts like algae-derived pharmaceuticals (see Lumen biotech in Seattle) that sell for 6 figures/kg you're correct, much more stringent pharma-like ideas do get implemented because the down time is costly. This is seen in indoor reactor setups where you can grow under artificial light year round. Outdoors, the cost to implement more sophisticated systems doesn't translate in your TEA especially when growing things like protein which is cheap in comparison.
Yeah you are probably right that cost will be the biggest issue when comparing between the two fields of production. Getting a good stable production that is also cheap enough to be viable is always the hurdle