Organizing a Fermi modeling 'hack' on the cost of cultured meat; hiring a co-coordinator

By david_reinstein, The Unjournal (bot) @ 2026-09-11T18:01 (+16)

The Unjournal is running a Fermi (aka BOTEC) modeling hack/workshop on the cost of producing cultivated meat. This follows our researcher/practitioner workshop and PQ work generating an initial public Monte Carlo model/calculator, public discussion, and belief elicitation and synthesis (preliminary version here). A rough plan for the hack is sketched here.  Looking for feedback and suggestions on this. 

This could also serve as a model for future workshops in other contexts.[1] It should also offer some insight into the reliability of these modeling approaches in general.  

I've often wondered: these models seem to often depend on a lot of structural and definitional assumptions. How sensitive are they to reasonable initial choices? To what extent would independent groups engaging in these BOTECs tend to converge?

We're looking for a modeling co-coordinator and co-facilitator as a one-off role, but it may lead to more such work depending on success and funding. You'd likely be work with David Reinstein, David Manheim, and workshop participants in prepping, running, and following this up. We can offer only modest compensation (perhaps up to $1,000 delivered as a Tremendous reward for at least 20 hours of work).  You should have some  experience or familiarity with this sort of modeling (or forecasting,  cost-effectiveness analysis, or techno-economic analysis.) Nice to also have: experience coordinating collaborative workshops, familiarity with cultivated meat production considerations and some biology background, and building tools and sites with AI coding tools.

The workshop aims to do a combination of:

  1. Provide a clearly-explained workspace, with common estimands and parameter definitions, aligning understanding, terminology, etc.    
  2. Further consolidate and refine sourced beliefs and evidence, identifying remaining uncertainty and high-value next steps
  3. Enable and encourage workshop participants (at least a few individuals or groups) to model this independently;  considering convergence, reliability, and modeling degrees of freedom. (And providing insights for future modeling approaches and workshops in general).
  4. Build, improve, and communicate a reasoning-transparent "consensus model"  

The co-coordinator  could support us in planning and preparing for the hack, coordinating and running it, and following up and analyzing and communicating the results. It could be tied to a formal/academic research project if it makes sense for you.  

If interested, or to refer or nominate someone,   please email contact@unjournal.org as soon as you can (ideally before 24 September 2026) to express your interest and share your CV/work samples/experience.[2] Feel free to ask questions or 'apply in the comments' if you want to do this publicly.

 

  1. ^

    Potentially including geopolitical risks, AI scaling, funding and aid, etc. 

  2. ^

    Something like:

    • three to five sentences on your relevant experience and interest (feel free to say more, we'll try to consider, credit, and respond to all suggestions.   
    • your CV and/or LinkedIn
    • Maybe a one link to a relevant model, analysis, code repository, or work sample, if you have one
    • your availability and time zone; and
    • any prior involvement or public position relevant to cultivated meat
david_reinstein @ 2026-09-17T22:03 (+2)

Note : I prompted AI to make some small changes here and it seems to have done a full rewrite. It’s now a better description of the role but a less good description of the plan and process, so I’m gonna try to revert this partially.

david_reinstein @ 2026-09-18T02:14 (+2)

Okay, I basically restored it, and yay, I'm not getting flagged.

Denis @ 2026-09-16T16:15 (+1)

Hey, I have experience with the preliminary parts of this - chemical engineering, but not in the context of cultivated meat. Happy to help / advise. 

I have run industrial workshops where we'd get everyone in a room, start with a blank sheet of paper and end up with an 80/20 process flow diagram, highlighting the certainties and the open questions and the opportunities for further research, and then move on from this (with a different group sometimes) to build an 80/20 TEA. 

To be clear, what I have run was not as computationally intense as you propose. The model with Monte-Carlo syntheses etc would typically be a secondary step. The first step would be to get the right information into a flowsheet, then into a TEA, and for each parameter to have a clear idea of the sources of variability and the uncertainties. Then you can even run the Monte Carlo simulation on the TEA itself if it's simple enough. 

It's not rocket-surgery, as W would say. Just structure and getting the right people, the right knowledge and the right mentality in the room, and getting the right pre-work done. 

Since I don't work in this field, I can't really say to what extent the bit I could help with has already been done ... if not, I'd be happy to help, time permitting. No interest in being paid to help, at least for the first iteration. 

 

david_reinstein @ 2026-09-16T17:55 (+2)

Thank you (and for also reaching out by email) -- I'll be in touch.

I have run industrial workshops where we'd get everyone in a room, start with a blank sheet of paper and end up with an 80/20 process flow diagram, highlighting the certainties and the open questions and the opportunities for further research, and then move on from this (with a different group sometimes) to build an 80/20 TEA.

That seems very relevant, although it sounds like what you're talking about is potentially at a different stage of development than what we're considering, and perhaps somewhat more focused on the scientific and engineering issues than on the cost and economic ones. For cultivated meat, things are a bit further along as I understand it. There are already production processes that have been able to generate at least some amount of usable outputs in different domains, although these are very expensive and have not produced a broad range of comparable products yet. And there's been quite a considerable amount of mapping of the processes and some TEAs that have been done.

To be clear, what I have run was not as computationally intense as you propose. The model with Monte-Carlo syntheses etc would typically be a secondary step. The first step would be to get the right information into a flowsheet, then into a TEA, and for each parameter to have a clear idea of the sources of variability and the uncertainties. Then you can even run the Monte Carlo simulation on the TEA itself if it's simple enough.

I'm not sure that what we're proposing is quite as computationally challenging as you suggest, and of course, the coding part of computation is pretty easy now. It's easy to set things up to run simulations with help from our friends Claude and Codex. This is kind of like what we've already done leading up to the workshop, adjusted since then: https://unjournal.github.io/cm_pq_modeling/

... but that still needs a lot of verification, sensitivity testing, etc. (Hence the followup workshop and hack session).

Also happy to discuss the concepts and processes I might have overlooked ("flowsheet" etc.)

It's not rocket-surgery, as W would say. Just structure and getting the right people, the right knowledge and the right mentality in the room, and getting the right pre-work done.

What we've been trying to do, but could still benefit from another perspective.

Since I don't work in this field, I can't really say to what extent the bit I could help with has already been done ... if not, I'd be happy to help, time permitting. No interest in being paid to help, at least for the first iteration.

I'll be in touch. I think your expertise and experience is valuable for this, whether or not it's exactly the profile we were seekin

The Unjournal (bot) @ 2026-09-16T18:44 (+1)

Following up on more from your email, which you said was okay to share here. I give my impressions below, but I think your own insights and experience are themselves helpful, so I'm sharing them.  

Very tangibly, what I would propose (and this may already have been done) is to choose one route (at a time) and then go through that process, end-to-end, unit operation by unit operation, from RM sourcing to finished product in stores, and look at the costs, challenges and uncertainties of each one.

That makes sense. I think that's largely consistent with what we've done and are planning to do more of, but my own modeling tended to isolate each input and use it interchangeably in each of the different process paths. (See here for a mapping and explainer for a few different processes.)  

 I see value in treating each possible process as potentially its own thing. In one sense, it might seem reasonable to model the cost of certain inputs in one process as the cost of those same inputs in another process. On the other hand, there may be subtleties here. E.g., , in a process that uses certain inputs more extensively, this might foster a larger-scale market with lower average costs. 

IMHO doing this for one process is already a huge job, not something you do in one session, unless you already have a very aligned and technically detailed analysis of the full process.

We have done quite a bit of scoping and mapping, as linked above, and we've brought in some people with real expertise, but I still do take this point. I find a synchronous group session a good coordinating and motivation tool for pushing things forward.  But I agree it might be worth stretching it out over a few separate sessions targeting different approaches or focuses,  to avoid our being overwhelmed. 

Where I’ve done this it’s been for processes like making detergents (in Procter & Gamble) and synthesising MOF’s (at Immaterial). We would try to get at least one person with an intimate deep technical knowledge of each process step in the room (maybe not all together) and we would run it almost like a devil’s advocate panel where we’d intentionally challenge all the assumptions. For example, how to get material from one step to the next – does it have to be transported? Does it have to change temperature or pressure? Is it stable? Does it need to be sterilized? Etc.

Sounds very promising and potentially worth our emulating. Naturally, it needs the physical, scientific expertise, rather just modelers and economists. Maybe easier to do in contexts where people don't seem to have strong interests, agendas, or "positions" on the issues. In the CM context, I think it's something in between. Certainly, there are people in groups with a strong attachment to seeing this work and maybe occasional lapses into "soldier" rather than "scout" mode. And perhaps also some motivated/entrenched skeptics (which we've had a harder time engaging in the workshops themselves, although we've been able to get some anonymous input). On the other hand, even among those ~advocating for CM and trying to make it work, there seems to be some decent open-mindedness about which processes are cheaper, how much everything will cost, etc. 

It’s important that the moderator NOT have strong opinions, the point is to passively collect and combine the wisdom of the room, but also to highlight questions and disagreements (not necessarily to solve them at the time while 12 other people wait!).

I've been trying to do that, and I've been putting myself forward as not having strong opinions, beliefs, or any sort of dog in this fight. I think the same applies to David Manheim and others on our team. 

I don’t know what timeline you have in mind. However, if you plan to do it very soon, I would definitley push back and propose instead that you might want to do a pre-meeting soon, in which you would capture what information is needed, and how it should be shared, and then identify who will get that information for each topic, before you’d run the definitive session(s).

Good ideas -- as mentioned, we've done some of the pre-work, in a certain sense, but I think there's more to do, and this seems like a good framing of it. As long as the participants are willling to show up for multiple sessions (or weigh in async).  

Timeline is probably in the next few months. Hopefully, we make something happen before the end of the year. 

Again, maybe all this information is freely available and I’m wrong, so feel free to ignore that.

GFI has made a lot available, but I think there's still more of this preparation to do. And GFI could be argued to have a particular agenda, or at least solutions that they consistently tend to support and to stake in the research. So it's good to have some independent vetting to make things more legibly credible. 

Obviously, you can do a BOTEC with whatever level of accuracy you want. Maybe I’m overestimating the accuracy you want. Any chemical engineer in the field could do a BOTEC in 10 minutes. The question is: how valid will that BOTEC be if it’s not based on informed knowledge about what this will actually be like when you consider three things

  1. It will be done at scale, and economies of scale will apply.
  2. There will be many unexpected problems and additional costs that you didn’t imagine (no matter how well you do the exercise)
  3. There will be constant innovation and cost-reduction over the first few years. You cannot plan this – it will happen when people realise which step is limiting rate or driving costs, and they decide to focus on how to improve that, and suddenly lots of creative solutions will emerge.

This all makes sense to me.  I think the value of precision is probably less here than for things like making detergents, where you're trying to perhaps decide between a few very similar options on the basis of cost and profitability. The fundamental question here is more about the probability that  each type of cultured meat and process (and with what mixing proportions etc.) will be roughly cost-comparable to "organic" (animal) meat. An order-of-magnitude difference in the forecasts and TEAs, which seems to make a big difference in the decision whether to invest in CM R&D  vs other interventions.