I am really really excited about lab grown meat making it into the mass market and ultimately becoming cheaper than traditional meat. The environmental benefits will be insane; how much of the earth is currently devoted to either raising animals or growing feed to feed animals? If we can centralise the production of meat, suddenly we have huge swathes of land that, perhaps naively, I hope can be reforested.
I'm currently looking at my bag of Cheetos and there is a largish 'warning'/statement on the back that says : "Produced with Genetic Engineering." Economics aside, I think you are going to have to put something like that on every unit of lab-meat that is sold, if not those words exactly (depends on the tech). People, for some reason, have gotten onto the 'Organic = Better' bus. Lab-meat is going to have to go against that zeitgeist. We already know that people will pay a lot more for 'organic' beef burgers, so I think we can say that the ethical issues are not in fact issues for most consumers, the health ones are though. Lab-meat, for most American consumers, is a no-go. Say McD's uses lab-meat, and they can undercut the price of a 'cheeseburger' by, what, 25%? A lot of people are still going to go to BK, as their marketers will gleefully and truthfully advertise that their burgers are 'real.' Outside of Sodexo, frozen dinners, and HotPocket, the only people that are going to buy lab-meat products are the dreadfully poor ones. A large market, unfortunately, but not one that you can reap big margins from.