Niyati Gupta

Copy the pig, not the brewery.

In a Jersey City pilot plant, pork is growing in tanks no bigger than a few craft-beer fermenters. That is the heresy. The rest of the cultivated-meat industry has spent a decade chasing one number: bigger. Hundred-thousand-liter bioreactors. Stadium-scale vats. Niyati Gupta looked at the same problem and reached the opposite answer.

Her reactors top out around 1,000 to 10,000 liters. No giant stirred tanks, no spinning impellers shredding the cells, no stem cells at all. The argument is almost insultingly simple: a pig is a very efficient machine for turning feed into meat, so the thing to copy is the pig's efficiency, not a chemical plant's scale. Fork & Good claims roughly three to four calories of feedstock in for every calorie of meat out - on its math, more efficient than the animal it replaces.

That contrarian streak has a track record now, not just a thesis. In 2024 the company announced what it calls the first revenue in cultivated red meat, through a joint development agreement with an $8 billion global food manufacturer. The year before, at Davos, Gupta put a hybrid cultivated-and-conventional pork blend in front of a double-blind panel. Half of the forty tasters could not tell it from the 100% conventional plate.

She is unsentimental about the field's hype cycle. Cultivated meat has been five years away for about fifteen years, and Gupta has watched well-funded rivals promise cost parity from giant factories that do not yet exist. Her line on the whole genre of confident predictions: "Nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes." She thinks the category might reach 1% of the conventional meat market within a decade. She also thinks anyone claiming to know the date is guessing.