In the fall of 2018, a few weeks after I interviewed Tyson Foods' Tom Hayes, he suddenly and unexpectedly resigned as CEO. The official word was that he did so for “personal reasons,” but I had a hard time believing it. The broader meat industry was in turmoil because of oversupply and trade wars with China, Tyson stock was declining, and I had to wonder if the company's shareholders saw Hayes as a man with a premature, or at least a poorly timed, vision.
Yet among the dozens of people I interviewed about the future of meat, it was Hayes who made the timeliest and most convincing case for meat alternatives—and cellular meats in particular.
He emphasized that the entire “cell-to-fork” process for growing and harvesting lab meats is two to six weeks—a blink of an eye compared with the two and a half years it typically takes to grow cattle from conception to maturity. That represents huge cost and energy savings. Hayes also pointed out that cultured meats eliminate concerns about E. coli and other pathogens that can contaminate animal meat during processing. The single biggest risk in his business, he said, is contamination. A few months after Cargill invested in cell-based meat producer Memphis Meats, it recalled 130,000 pounds of ground beef that had been contaminated with E. coli—a problem that wouldn't happen with lab-grown meat.
