So firstly, good news, Lab Diamonds are rapidly taking over the industry and doing a number on blood diamonds.
Most people don’t realise how fast technological adoption can flip once the product becomes good enough.
For decades, lab-grown diamonds were a scientific curiosity, an r&d money sink. The first gem-quality stones hit the market around 2010 and barely made up 1% of diamond sales. They were treated as knock-offs, “not real.”
Then something changed.
Slowly, by 2019, they climbed to 3%
By 2025 ~21%
In barely over a decade, a taboo, “weird,” lab-made product quietly carved out a fifth of a $90-billion global market.
Why?
Because the value was too obvious to ignore:
identical product, 70–90% cheaper, ethically clean, and lower environmental impact.
Go figure when you can just ‘make’ a diamond it is easier than trying to dig it out of the ground.
No amount of emotional attachment to “the real thing” could stop the curve once consumers realised they were getting the same diamond without the baggage.
Industrial livestock agriculture today is the exact mirror of the old diamond industry:
• ethical issues
• environmental issues
• supply-chain volatility
• expensive to scale
• heavily resource-intensive
And just like diamonds in 2010, cultivated meat today sits at the “barely noticeable market share but already technically real” stage.
It exists. It’s edible. It’s improving fast. And the first commercial-scale factories are being built.
Go figure when you can just ‘grow’ meat it is easier than trying to raise an entire animal.
Lab-grown diamonds went from a lab curiosity to a fifth of the global market in 12 years.
Cultivated meat is at its 2010 moment right now.
The difference?
The Diamond industry is about $80 billion.
The Animal Based industry is worth $1.5 trillion.
And if diamonds are any guide, the shift from “blood diamonds” to ethical, scalable lab-grown stones may be the exact blueprint for the transition from industrial “blood meat” to clean, cruelty-free protein.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076048/global-market-share-of-lab-grown-diamonds/
25 Comments
Why the heck not. If lab-grown diamonds are indistinguishable from mined diamonds then I’d say the difference doesn’t matter, and I’d say the same for lab-grown vs farmed meat.
Countries like Australia or Argentina are looking at an economic and environmental cliff.
Isn’t most of the growth in lab grown diamonds coming from china? I know quite a few people who seem adverse to them for some bizarre reason. Either way i don’t see the lab meat replacing real meat, massive diffeference between wearing something and eating it and lab diamonds have been around for a while. Think they will find it much harder to convince people to eat this. They haven’t really suceeded with shifting diets much full stop, let alone something so drastic.
Meat generates some insanely stubborn positions from all sides. I eat meat but have no issue whatsoever with lab grown.
Diamonds don’t seem to have the everyday availability of use and subsequent opinions like meat and another good example – energy. On paper, using the least-polluting forms of energy just makes sense. Same as the least-harmful form of meat. But people are weirdly attached to the classic versions.
The meat part depends on when and how the bioreactor processes can make do without animal-derived serum and growth factors.
The cost (the effective cost, not factoring in the REAL cost like climate damage that farmers don’t have to pay for) will determine everything. Lab grown meat can only win if it’s cheaper.
Lab grown diamonds are identical to natural ones, lab grown meat is not, at least for now. If the technology improves, and in turn the quality gets better and prices lower, then sure, I don’t see why not.
Lab grown diamonds have an advantage in that mined diamonds are way overpriced.
Lab grown meat does not have this same advantage, and there’s already a great deal of science and research spent in optimizing the production of farm raised meat that lab meat still needs to catch up to.
Maybe 20+ years later with a few more breakthroughs it’ll start taking a nice double digit % marketshare as costs and convenience become competitive. But for now I don’t see it beating $2.49/lb chicken drumsticks.
If lab grown meat becomes 10% the price of the real thing then sure, as it would with any commodity (cotton, steel, oil). Not even close to that currently
I dont know, but the only scenario where natural diamonds should have any market-share is when they are objectively cheaper to extract than synthetic ones.
And even then, they’re a morally deficient option.
21% is way too low a market share for an objectively equal or inferior product that requires massive human right’s violations to extract.
Possibly, just need to have the exact same look, flavor, and chemical make up of meat and have mountains of evidence that its at least as safe as consuming meat (like a grass fed steak, not McDonalds hamburger)
I would say that lab grown meat will eventually take over, but it will be a while before it’s really the same as meat from an animal. Diamonds are just carbon. A single element in a particular arrangement. Meat is much more complex. One steak will tasts different to another steak based on fat content or what you feed to the cow. There’s a bunch of different types of cells all intertwined with eachother.
My wife has a 5 carat lab grown diamond on her finger. A bout 20% of our married friends do as well. I’ve been wearing lab grown in my ears for years.
There is almost no reason to go natural for the majority of people. I would say the natural market valuation is basically like the art market. Just rich people saying this is worth more for no actual reason
Got weird feelings we’re gonna ban it or defactp ban it. There’s no law against building nuclear power the regulatory structure has just made it uncompetitive in America. Some Republicans have already pushed back on it
I’d eat lab grown meat any day compared to ‘fake meat’ stuff that’s full of seed oil and shit
In my view diamonds are one thing. We don’t ingest those, so we aren’t losing any potential vitamins from the lab. With meat though, there may still be parts we don’t understand about it that we need. In the process of efficiency of “printing”, we won’t ssee the same nutrional benefits for a few generations.
That said: I’m very pro-lab meat. Cows are cuddly.
The only people that will tell you natural diamonds are better are the people that want to sell them to you.
As others pointed out, if lab grown meat can fall to 20% of the price of slaughtered meat it will absolutely displace slaughtered meat faster than lab grown diamonds are replacing mined diamonds, because at least diamonds still suffer from the luxury effect, where people tend to value them more the more expensive they are.
Meat does not suffer from that same issue. If it tastes just as good and is cheaper, people will flock to lab grown meat.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Lab-grown diamonds were always more affordable than mined diamonds.
That economic benefit is massive, because it gives the new entrant the chance to create new markets/customers. Industries that would have never considered a diamond before, are suddenly curious.
This is not the case with lab grown meat, at least not yet. Industrial agriculture is WAAAAAAY more efficient and cost effective than lab grown meat. The lab grown meat, has a long way to go.
I think lab grown meat needs a marketing change, a lot of people ive talked with about this are like “lab grown?? No thanks”
**The** only thing lab meat really has to compete on is cost, that’s it. Many parts of the world are experiencing a brutal cost of living crisis, and we have all observed that principles and personal preferences take a backseat to meeting basic needs while saving money.
Some people might complain about how it’s “unnatural” or how it’s “slop”, but as long as it’s safe, tastes comparable, and competes with or even beats slaughter meat on price, even many of its hater will hold their noses and give it a try.
It’s kind of a cold and cruel calculus, but if we’re bound to be suffering for a while, why not try and lay some foundations?
Very different scenarios. A diamond is rock, whose intrinsic value is 99% inflated by marketing. Sure its hardness does make it very desirable for industrial applications, but that’s not what drives diamond prices. A lab grown diamond is so perfectly identical that Debeers spent millions trying to invent a way to tell them apart, but all they have is “yep, that’s too big and too perfect to be real”.
Lab grown meat IS NOT the same as the real thing, and people are rightfully skeptic when you ask them to eat something that processed.
We already have some pretty bloody good plant based alternatives – the beyond burgers are very good. Not indistinguishable, but just good in their own right. I don’t think lsb grown meat is ever going to be as cheap to produce as the plant based meat alternatives.
Well the thing with lab diamonds is a super positive thing and i hope “natural diamonds” get banned at some point only if mined up to modern standards and payment.
But this is a physical process not a biological like meat ist. Mixing the two together just doesn’t sit right with me. I tried a lot of “meat alternatives” and yes you can eat them. But there are magnitudes between arftificial and natural.
I HATE mass procuction of meat the way it is today and it is outright pure horror.
Some people will never adapt. And there is a huge difference between a technical and biological product.
I think “lab meat” will be able to substitute some of the demand but for the rest – we should lower meat production in general and REALY raise the needed “qualifications” to raise a pig or a cow. I like meat but i know consumption is far too high and the scale and impact of current meat industry is horrible.
“Industrial scale animal farming” and processing needs to be banned completely and the least should be real “free range” conditions and not the bs we get on labels in Europe. If you read the requirements for raising pigs and cows to get the “highest” label for “animal life quality” – is a joke and it is a bad one.
Yes lab grown meat will be an alternative on some scale…but we are so deeply rooted in consuming meat – you can’t switch to pure lab grown meat in my opinion and this won’t change anytime soon.
We need to start to fight the obvious problems with industrial meat production wich will necessary need to far less, yet higher quality and fair raised meat, and people would have to eat less meat OR switch to alternatives.
Anything else is not realistic imo.
I have theory that Lab grown meat will get a foot hold through the fast food industry.
Standard meat processing uses fillers like plant material, connective tissue, nerves, and fat and make up 20–50% of the patty.
I could see a scenario where McD/Burger King, etc. use it to increase profit margins by using as a supplement to traditional meat to lower the cost but as it’s a smaller portion of the burger/nugget/whatever and it doesn’t need to be declared to the customer. Getting over initial customer hesitation about lab grown meat.