Short Summary
This is the first alternative protein intervention that AIM has ever recommended, and we are excited to invest in an alternative path to victory for the animal movement.
Giving Green finds that promoting alternative proteins to reduce demand for conventional meat is one of the most promising climate interventions and recommends the Good Food Institute (GFI) as one of its top non-profits.
This work is very neglected. Scale-up funding has been historically underinvested relative to R&D funding. Currently, only one person in GFI's 15-person US policy team and one person in their 12-person Europe policy team are focused on securing scale-up funding.
The Problem
What’s the problem?
Most alternative protein startups face high capital expenditure (CapEx) requirements estimated between $15 million and $250 million to build a single commercial facility. Yet, they struggle to attract investment due to perceived risk and uncertain returns. This underinvestment leads to high prices and limited availability, preventing alternative proteins from reaching cost parity with animal products and the scale necessary to displace these products.
Why does it matter?
Globally, food systems are responsible for major environmental impacts. Food systems account for 33% of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, use 70% of the world's available fresh water, and use 50% of the world’s habitable land. Animal production is responsible for the majority (roughly 36 to 60%) of the food systems environmental impacts.
Animal production also results in the immense suffering of billions of farm animals annually. Roughly 85.44 billion land animals are slaughtered annually for meat, and as many as 78 to 171 billion fish and crustaceans are also killed for human consumption.
Alternative protein companies are struggling and shutting down due to impact investors and VCs pulling out of the space. We need government investment support to allow these companies to survive, grow, and hopefully encourage private investors to re-invest.
Neglectedness:
Scale-up funding has historically been underinvested compared to R&D funding. 16 scale-up funding grants have been made across eight countries vs. 336 grants made across 28 countries for R&D.
There is likely less than 5 FTE working in non-profits to secure scale-up funding from governments globally.
The Solution
What’s the proposed solution?
Lobby governments to allocate funds for loan guarantee programmes, infrastructure grants, and other financial interventions that could be made available to alternative protein companies attempting to scale.
Why do we trust this solution?
Historically, public investment and policy support have been vital to help new technologies scale. The success of solar panels, electric vehicles, and certain vaccines all relied on public procurement, tax incentives, loan guarantees, and grants to reduce early-stage commercial risk and encourage investor confidence.
Supporting alternative proteins is promising for its climate and animal impacts and aligns with broader policy goals such as national security, sustainability, and food security.
How robust is the evidence?
GFI has been very successful in lobbying governments to secure R&D funding. We estimate that GFI raised $1.67 in funding for each dollar spent.
We are also starting to see success in securing scale-up funding, with the average infrastructure grant totalling $14.1M.
The Impact
What impact could this have?
Helping alternative proteins scale and displace meat consumption could avert 9.9 million tonnes of CO2e emissions and spare 196 million animals.
Estimated cost-effectiveness:
Although more speculative, our cost-effectiveness analysis estimates that this intervention could avert 3-51 SADs/$ and cost $0.5-10 per tCO2e averted.
Ideal Founder Profile
Who is best suited to do this? *
A skilled generalist with strong communication and strategic thinking skills could handle most of the core tasks, including policy analysis, relationship-building, and persuasive materials production.
There would be a great benefit to the founding team having local policy experience as this political contextual knowledge and/or existing connections could speed up the charity’s progress.
The founding team would also benefit greatly from having previous experience working in alternative proteins or having a good overview of the alternative protein landscape in the target countries (the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Singapore seem particularly promising).
*We think candidates with the following skills will have a comparative advantage/be especially promising for founding this idea, but we would like to still encourage applicants from people who do not match this criteria who are enthusiastic about this idea and believe they may be well-suited for reasons not captured here
