I recently listened to a discussion about food technology on CBC Radio, and the upcoming disruption of the entire agricultural farming industry.

The alternative food sector is seeing explosive growth, and brands like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat are a big part of the narrative. But the core of this disruption is research to synthetically create the actual proteins found in popular foods. This means that whether it’s coffee, or steak, or even milk - all of this will be producible synthetically and at a higher quality than factory farming.

This part is particularly interesting, from Rethinking Food and Agriculture

The current industrialized, animal-agriculture system will be replaced with a Food-as-Software model, where foods are engineered by scientists at a molecular level and uploaded to databases that can be accessed by food designers anywhere in the world.

Currently, this process costs thousands of dollars to create. But those cost curves are decreasing rapidly, and soon most burgers will be produced in a factory. Disruption theory is taking place in the food industry, and it’s pretty incredible. This also mirrors the evolution of the synthetic plastics industry in the early 1900’s.

More on the CBC conversation here.