One of the strongest selling points of plant-based and clean meat is the efficiency of production: The conversion of inputs to outputs is vastly more streamlined than cycling calories through an animal. Lesser appreciated, but perhaps more economically compelling, is also the improved market efficiency: far less time and waste and far greater responsiveness to consumer demand for a range of products and species.

1. Supercharged timesaver: No pregnancy, no birth, no raising, no slaughter

Imagine the predicament of a cattle rancher trying to decide how many cows to impregnate this season. Current market conditions—the price of beef or feed—do him no good. He’s forced to look into a crystal ball and predict demand fully two or three years into the future, after his heifers’ nine-month pregnancies and the 16 to 24 months it will take to raise his calves from birth to slaughter. Since overall supply will affect prices, he must also somehow anticipate every other rancher’s possible calculations.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Liz Specht, PhD, is the associate director of science and technology at the Good Food Institute.

It’s little wonder that the livestock industry has historically been riddled with boom and bust cycles. While more sophisticated prediction models are being developed, this market inefficiency is not circumventable; it’s inherent in the biology of the animals.

Even the fast-maturing chicken is subject to these relentless cycles. Today’s chickens reach slaughter weight about six weeks after hatching, but the lag also needs to account for time in the shell and the hens’ laying rate, meaning the broiler supply must be predicted 18 to 24 months in advance.

In the animal agriculture industry, once the production clock starts ticking, it can’t be stopped. You can’t put a barn full of chickens on pause at five weeks of age until the price of chicken rebounds, and you can’t ask your hens to temporarily stop laying. This ingrained volatility has also powered the consolidation of the meat industry: Only the biggest companies could weather the troughs, and these companies quickly bought up competitors who didn’t have enough financial buffer in hard times.

Compare this years-long lead time with that for plant-based or clean meat, where a manufacturing facility can have finished product rolling off the line in hours or days. For plant-based meat, the raw materials (protein isolates, flours, flavorings, etc.) are typically dry powders with high stability and can be stored inexpensively for extended periods of time, ready at a moment’s notice for on-demand use. The entire process from pre-treatment (soaking) of the dry ingredients to finished product takes only a few hours. Even products with more complex post-processing like smoking or marination will be ready to ship to retailers within just a few days of starting the production line.

The same will be true for clean meat (created by growing meat outside of an animal from a small cell sample, also called cultured meat or cell-based meat) once it is available through large-scale production, which many analysts expect will happen within the next decade or so. The main raw materials are also dry powdered nutrients that can be stored for relatively long periods of time. Vials of frozen cells used to produce the meat can be thawed and begin dividing within hours. Most industry insiders estimate that producing a batch of thousands of kilograms of meat will require three to five weeks start to finish. If production facilities are operating the seed train continuously, they could harvest the finished product within a week.

Both plant- and cell-based meat face far less formidable forecasting challenges. Manufacturers can rev up production lines in essentially real-time response to demand, meaning the system has far less waste and greater profitability because manufacturers aren’t contending with flooded markets driving down prices.

2. Solving the carcass balancing problem

In the meat industry, the carcass balancing problem describes how animal bodies are not proportioned to the ratios of products that humans actually demand. In fact, our culinary traditions have evolved to make disproportionate use of undesirable parts of the animal.