Will fake meat make it in Singapore?
June 7, 2021
This is the future for Singapore. If you really want to be bigger than Elon Musk in let’s say five years from now (and this is just a conservative projection). Then this is one industry that you should seriously consider going into. Because at the current threshold level, the entry cost is still low. But it will not stay this way for long. In my assessment, the shift towards fake meat will be based primary on health benefits. As real meat is not only very cost ineffcient to produce, but its also a logistical nightmare. But the main tipping point in favor of fake meat is simply this – what many do not realise is the amount of antibiotics and chemical enhancers that currently goes into producing real meat is so overwhelmingly excessive that I don’t think any sane person will want to go near it in the next five or ten years. I am not saying real meat will go the way of cigarettes completely, it will not. Because in the future there will always be botique farms that maybe only produce ten cows per year, but the cost will be simply out of reach for most. All I am saying is its simply a production and cost to opportunity calculation – in the future, mankind will have to eat less real meat otherwise we will just kill ourselves! And end up destroying the planet. The next question is will fake meat be as good as real meat? The paradox is real meat these days don’t even taste like meat as it was ten or twenty years ago. let me give you a real life example, if you buy a slab of butter these days, it doesn’t spread or taste like butter in the past, that’s because cows these days are feed oil palm based feed, so this idea that fake meat will never be as good as real meat will always be a red herring argument. The other question is will the govt support this initiative? Well all I can say is Singapore Inc needs to go thru a paradigm shift not only organizationally, but mentally as well, when it comes to retooling the wealth creation engines. But I think the civil servants who drove this idea should be given a free holiday in Batam. Just make it happen lah!