The Critical Role of Data Analytics & Design of Experiment (DOE) in Alternative Meat & Dairy Production

The market for meat and dairy alternatives is growing rapidly. Consumer demand for protein alternatives jumped 60% from 2019 to 2021.

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Investors are also betting big on this new market, pouring $16 billion into plant-based and cultured meat in the last decade ($13 billion of that since 2017). Two primary factors are driving this growth as manufacturers:

• Discover new ways to create tasty plant-based protein alternatives
• Learn how to scale up production to make products widely available at an affordable price

For manufacturers of plant-based proteins and cultured meat and dairy products, this is a critical time in product development and manufacturing. Companies that can create delicious-tasting meat and dairy alternatives — and get to market fastest — can capture a huge portion of this growing market share. Time to market has become one of the most valuable metrics for determining who will succeed in this category.  

The road to reducing your time to market isn’t always a smooth one, and you will need the right tools to get there. Fortunately, there are solutions to help you reduce delays and improve production. Here are some challenges, solutions, and questions to consider along the way to improve your products. 

Common Challenges in Alternative Meat & Dairy Production

Moving plant-based protein, alternative meats, and alternative dairy products from the development phase to the production phase is difficult for even seasoned manufacturers. For companies in this critical step, there are four primary pain points:

1. Managing quality control. Optimizing your final product to get the correct taste, texture, quality, and yield so you can consistently manufacture at a larger scale.
2. Keeping costs down. Production costs for cultured meat and dairy must be at or below a target threshold (about 10€ per kilogram, or about $5 per pound) to ensure that you can sell your product at a price that most consumers can afford. High production costs can quickly price you out of the market.
3. Investing in research and development (R&D). Manufacturers can save money up front by conducting fewer experiments in the R&D phase, but that can lead to lower confidence and lower overall quality — with higher risk of failure. Creating an optimal product requires a commitment to R&D.
4. Scaling up with consistency. What you create in the lab is not always reproducible or scalable to meet mass-market demand and stay within cost and quality parameters.

Using Data Analytics & DOE to Address Cultured Meat & Dairy Production Challenges

When it comes to cultured dairy and cultured meat alternatives, being first (or one of the first) to market presents huge competitive advantages. For companies ready to move to mass-market production, multivariate data analysis (MVDA) and DOE can significantly reduce time to market and costs and increase the quality of your final product.

Time to market has become one of the most valuable metrics for determining who will succeed in this category.

It is not an entirely new concept — many biopharmaceutical manufacturers and food and beverage companies have been using DOE and data analytics to solve production problems and reduce costs for years. But as companies try to rush to market with new products, too many are skipping these steps to try to be the first. The downside of that strategy is that you significantly increase your risk of something going wrong that affects cost or quality or creates delays that could take months or years to solve.

Data analytics and DOE implementation at the earliest stages provides:

• Lower total costs. Fluctuations and variables that you do not understand can create higher total costs as you struggle to produce a consistently high-quality finished product.
• Fewer delays and faster time to market. Investing time and effort into DOE and data analytics to get a more complete picture of relationships, patterns, and root causes helps you avoid significant delays and failures once full-scale production begins.
• More consistency over time. Consistency is the key to success in what is becoming a highly competitive food manufacturing market. Rolling out a product too soon that does not consistently deliver the quality, texture, and taste consumers expect will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
• Complete scalability. Ramping up production only to find that you cannot produce at scale creates long delays that can tank a new product. Data analytics and DOE give you the confidence to know that you can replicate small-scale production in a complex, high-volume manufacturing environment.

4 Questions Data Analytics Can Help You Answer

Data analytics software can simplify even the most complex processes and interactions, helping you increase yield, quality, and sustainability with confidence. Data can also help you balance competing priorities for things like downtime versus risk.

Collecting the right information can help you answer four important questions:

1. Can you meet cost and quality metrics?
   Besides being fast, there must be a sweet spot where all the raw material amounts match up for the best overall solution to meet yield, cost, and quality. With a robust design of experiment, you can find this spot and create the best product in the allotted time, while limiting inconsistencies and the risk of failure.
2. What will be the approximate cost of your finished product?
   Once you have an ideal batch with the best combination, you can conduct a deeper analysis to determine whether what you are making with the finished product meets your cost parameters. With this data, you may be able to find a better model to meet quality requirements with lower total production costs.
3. How will your current recipe react to raw material variations?
   Any changes in your raw materials could have a significant effect on your finished product. When you encounter changes due to market fluctuations, vendor or supplier issues, or other unforeseen events, MVDA adjusts for any and all raw material variables to determine how they might change the outcome of the finished product.
4. What variables will most affect your finished product?
   By far, the most significant variation will be any changes in the raw materials, as discussed above. But that is not the only variable you could encounter. Data analytics and DOE can help you identify and address variables that will impact your final product. Other fluctuations require the ability to make quick decisions and adjustments to maintain quality, including changes in:

• Production operations
• Personnel
• Manufacturing environment
• And more

Continual Improvement with Data Analytics

Using data analytic software allows you to quickly see information you might otherwise miss, even if you had years to scan through historic data. But MVDA and DOE are not a one-and-done event — they provide actionable opportunities for you to continuously improve your processes and products.

MVDA software and the data it provides must be easy to use. As you scale up production and move products out to consumer markets, the right data help you continually run analyses and better assess processes to reduce your costs and enhance efficiency and quality. The end result is a confident understanding of which variables have the most impact for targeted and effective improvements and the ability to make faster and better decisions.

Sartorius Can Help You Master Data Analytics & DOE

When you partner with Sartorius for alternative meat and dairy production, you get decades of experience using data analytics and DOE tools to improve your process. We begin by identifying the most important variables in your process and collecting data on them.

Our software looks for root-cause problems and patterns in multivariate data sets and how these  all interconnect. Then it analyzes the information using comparative studies and process monitoring. What you get is raw data and graphical representations that make it easy to visualize the patterns and interpret the data.

Talk with our team today to learn more about our data analytics software solutions and how they can help you stay competitive in the cultured dairy and cultured meat space.