Hybrid products combine plant-based and cultivated components, making them a cheaper option for cultivated meat firms attempting to compete with conventional meat. This market will resolve YES if a hybrid product can be purchased by any member of the public by January 1st, 2025.
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1.00Can you be more specific about the edge cases around "hybrid" and "can be purchased by any member of the public"?
On "hybrid," past commercial sales of cultivated meat in San Francisco and Singapore have all been of products that technically have plant-based and cultivated components (e.g., the consumer can buy a "bao bun with crispy sesame cultured chicken and spring onion"), even disregarding the presence of plant-based components (e.g., oils) in the "meat" itself. I assume this market is meant to refer to something like a meat-exclusive product (e.g., a piece of sausage) that has a headline description with explicit reference to plant ingredients (e.g., "an animal-free sausage made with cultivated protein and avocado oil").
On who needs to be able to buy it, I assume "any" means "at least one" rather than "each," but who is the public? Is it okay if any non-journalist/critic/investor/employee buys it? What if the few consumers are hand-selected by the meat producer or retailer (e.g., friends of employees, influencers)? What if there's a public application but only a few are selected from that list (and there's no public knowledge of how they were, so Jo Doe might have never stood a chance)? And what if the company says it can be purchased, but by your best guess, it has not actually been purchased yet (e.g., a waitlist)?
@TylerJohnston Interesting. I think the first widely available products will almost inevitably be hybrid, and seventeen months is quite a bit of time. I’m very skeptical of any purely cultured meat product being widely available before 2024 though.
@NicoDelon Yeah, I think it's more likely than not too, but I also think prediction markets have been overoptimistic about timelines and there's a decent chance that specialty restaurants buy up all the available cultivated meat through 2025.
I don't think any cultivated or hybrid product will be "widely" available before 2024.
Then again, this market is a bit ambiguous. Impossible currently uses soy leghemoglobin that would technically qualify it as a hybrid product with "plant-based and cultivated components," but that was true before the market was made, so I assume we're talking about something more like a burger that's like a 50/50 blend of cultivated beef and plant-based beef. And that seems further out to me.
@TylerJohnston Cultivated here should be clarified as cultured or "lab-grown." We defaulted to Robert Yaman's preferred nomenclature to match his piece but I'll ping Clara, who created the market, to clarify. Brands like Sci-Fi foods are what we're talking about, not Impossible, as you note.
I doubt though that it's 50/50. My bet is some of the first products we'll see are more like 90/10 and the cultivated/cultured part is fat.
@JCE And now that I read it, I think we should probably clarify whether or not this includes restaurants or not.
@JCE Esp. because Sci-Fi foods is projected to release in restuarants in 2024. (https://scififoods.com/faq)
@JCE Thanks for the clarification! I actually don't understand the science behind alt proteins much, but I think Impossible's ingredient is cultivated in the sense of being cultured/lab-grown. Maybe it still doesn't meet this market's resolution criteria because it's not using animal cells but instead genetically modified yeast, and it's creating an ingredient found originally in plants rather than animals (although it's in service of imitating ingredients found in animals).
Including restaurants makes sense to me — I was only mentioning them because I envisioned specialty restaraunts continuing to buy out available supply for 100% cultivated products. as they are selling now. But I realize now that I was imagining hybrid products in the sense of hybrid products that currently exist mixing plant-based and animal proteins that literally just blend the two, rather than cultivating a specific ingredient (which Robert's piece talks about, and which is probably way more likely). Liquidating my "no" position a bit!