[temp00345]

I'm curious about several things:

- does this process require expensive equipment ?

- I assume you can apply this process to other cells/substances - cocoa ? coca ? tobacco ? oranges ? potatoes ?

- if equipment became cheaper, could we envision people having a device for cellular agriculture at home?

[hybrid_cluster]

- Yes, doing this at a meaningful scale will require large bioreactors with a price tag of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. You will need LOTS of those reactors to get production beyond 1% of the world's current coffee consumption.

- With all of these, one has to ask what the point is if the bioreactor inputs are sugar (from plants) and other nutrients. If you want sustainability benefits for X where X = plant-based product, you're probably better off improving the current agricultural practices of growing X rather than growing X in a bioreactor.

- That's one of the loftier visions in biotech: decentralized manufacturing of basically anything. Anything along the lines of a convenient personal bioreactor currently seems like it might as well be a century away or more, but I'd certainly be an early adopter:)

[vletal]

I would guess that it depends on the final product. This works for coffee because it gets grinded to a fine powder. Cocoa might work as well, tobacco for e-smokig, etc.