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Notes -
There's at least some niche segments of the market where this won't matter. Some people like meat but want to reduce how frequently they eat it for environmental and ethical concerns. Although given the manufacturing process, I wonder how the emissions for lab grown meat would actually stack up...
Economically though, the whole process is a nightmare because cell culture has been developed for the medical field where costs don't matter, not the consumer market where there's actual competition. I was looking into this awhile back because I had some startup ideas that ran into similar problems as lab grown meat. The generic stuff (amino acids, sugars, lipids, etc) isn't bad, but the big problem is 'growth factors,' or recombinant proteins. In your body, the division of most cell types (and particularly muscle) are strictly controlled to avoid cancerous growths. They're typically quiescent unless certain soluble proteins stimulate receptors on their surface. Growing and purifying a cocktail of these proteins has been horrendously expensive, so people typically use fetal bovine serum (FBS) instead which costs 1500-2000$ per liter, and you use it at a final concentration of 5-10% so...a 10L bioreactor would cost you 2k in FBS alone, and produce about 250g/L or 5lbs of meat.
Obviously things have gotten cheaper (one of those articles mentions a plant-based substitute for FBS which I hadn't heard about previously), and economies of scale, but that paper mentions a floor of ~20$ per pound of meat which is a big ask even for the most motivated millenial-pseudo-vegetarian. Essentially, these people are going to have to develop an entirely new array of techniques tailored towards economic food production rather than medical research. Or just grow yeast instead.
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