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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mosa Meat

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced today that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

Growth medium is widely recognized in the cell-cultured meat industry as one of the nascent sector’s biggest cost drivers. According to a survey conducted by the Good Food Institute in 2020, growth media made up 80% or more of the total operating cost for 38% of those cell-cultured meat manufacturers who responded, while 72% of respondents indicated that growth media made up half or more of their total operating costs.

“There are multiple advantages to using Nicotiana tabacum as a hardy vector for producing GFs of non-animal origin,” Amit Yaari, CEO of BioBetter, said. “It is an abundant crop that has no place in the food-and-feed chain due to its extremely bitter taste and content of undesirable alkaloids. The global trend for reducing tobacco smoking also is raising concerns among tobacco growers that the crop might eventually become obsolete. Yet the tobacco plant has huge potential to become a key component in the future of food.”

By utilizing molecular farming techniques to derive growth factors entirely from the tobacco plants, BioBetter enters its name among a new cohort of startups looking to help scale up lower-cost media free of animal inputs. Other startups that have been developing growth medium alternatives free of FBS (fetal bovine serum) include Seawith and Back of the Yards Algae Sciences, both of which are utilizing algae to derive animal-free growth medium, and Biftek , which is using a secretive mix on microorganisms to create its animal-free growth medium. In addition, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat has also been very open about its efforts to develop growth media free of FBS and claims to have achieved an 80x reduction in cost.

“BioBetter is pioneering a novel protein expression platform to address the fast-growing demand for complex recombinant proteins,” Oded Shoseyov said. “Our GF technology will enable production of animal-free GFs at a scale of thousands of tons per year, and at a cost of US$1 per gram. This will alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks in advancing cultured meat to mass production.”

The Netherlands House of Representatives Passes Motion to Legalize Samples of Cell-Cultured Meat

This week, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal. The passing of the motion, proposed by the D66 and VVD parties, is being hailed by Dutch cell-cultured meat companies as an important step towards legalizing the sale of cell-cultured meat at retail.

Maastricht, Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is famously co-founded by Mark Post, who kickstarted the lab-grown meat industry when he created the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger back in 2013. The company applauded the move by its home country’s government as a first step towards legalizing the consumption of the product.

The move “speaks volumes about the momentum that is building for innovation in sustainable meat production,” the company told Dutch TV organization RTL.

Dutch politicians are understandably proud that their country is seen as the birthplace for cell-cultured meat innovation and see this move as one that will help them continue to stay relevant as startups around the world race to bring their products to market.

“This is a wonderful Dutch invention that can become an important source of food for humans,” said VVD MP Peter Valstar. “But, as with many innovations, we see that European regulations delay development earlier, while the rest of the world is now overtaking us with our own invention.”

Mosa Meat’s Head of Public Affairs, Robert Jones, echoed the sentiment.

“Cellular agriculture is a Dutch invention and we do not want to lose our edge over competitors,” said Jones. “Companies abroad, including Germany, France, and Belgium, are already able to introduce their products to the general public as a way to gain support and acceptance from consumers, which is extremely important.”

The move by the Netherlands is another sign governments around the world recognize the need to pass legal frameworks to legalize the consumption of cell-cultured meat. In the US, the USDA just wrapped up a public comment period that garnered 1,700 comments from industry and private individuals. In many ways, the tone struck by many of the public comments was similar to sentiments expressed by Dutch politicians about the need to create a modern legal framework around lab-grown meat to ensure that their country remains competitive in this fast-changing market.

“Regulatory frameworks need to be redesigned to keep pace with innovation and technology and future-proof our food system,” wrote cellular agriculture research organization New Harvest. “We cannot expect this technology to positively impact our food system when it is built on an outdated regulatory foundation and minimum public scientific data.”

Mosa Meat (Kinda) Open Sources Its Method For Cultivating Meat Without FBS

In recent years, Mosa Meat has made a couple of things clear: 1) They want to get as close to creating real meat without the cow as possible, and 2) They want to achieve this goal in the most humane, animal-free way.

They’ve documented their progress towards achieving both of these goals along the way, first by making news in 2016 with the announcement they’d figured out a method for cultivating meat without the use of FBS, or fetal bovine serum. Since that time, they’ve updated the world on their progress and even shared techniques for how they make “real meat” complete with cell-cultured fat and muscle fibers.

And this week, the company made news again with the publication of a paper on its method for achieving muscle differentiation through a process they describe as ‘serum-starvation.’ According to Mosa, it’s through the differentiating of cells into fibers that result in the structure and chew of meat, and it’s within the muscle fibers that the proteins and rich color of meat are produced.

The paper’s primary author, Tobias Messmer, describes how they focused on the proteins on the surface of cells to achieve this differentiation without FBS.

“By specifically activating these proteins (known as ‘receptors’), we are now able to recreate the same transition in the absence of any FBS.”

With the publication of this information, the company has essentially open-sourced the ideas behind achieving animal-free cell-cultured meat. However, the company hasn’t technically open-sourced the methods for re-use since they’ve also constructed some level of IP protection around elements of the process.

From Mosa founder Maarten Bosch: “Although the decision to publish this information could be seen as competitively sensitive, we highly value openness and transparency for the advancement of the entire cellular agriculture field. We’re also dedicated to creating a healthy business and protecting our intellectual property. Having made significant progress since submitting this paper over a year ago, we are convinced we are striking the right balance with this publication.“

It’s not that open source ideas and technologies are entirely incompatible with patent protection. In software, you can open source a technology and include a patent license grant as part of the open-source license. From the sounds of it, Mosa is specifically protecting its FBS-free feed formulation, limiting its use for commercial purposes without a license.

From the announcement: “We have filed a patent for the cell feed formulation, meaning it is publicly available but protected for commercial use for a limited amount of years.”  

Patent protection or not, the industry certainly benefits from Mosa’s sharing of their processes as they innovate towards what they call “real meat” without the animal.

Mosa Meat Achieves an ‘Over 65x Reduction’ in Costs for Its Cultured Fat

Dutch cultured protein company Mosa Meat said over the weekend it has reduced the cost of its fat media by 66 times thanks to the work of a group the company refers to as its Fat Team. Without listing actual price numbers, Mosa Meat said its fat medium now costs 1.52 percent of what it did less than two years ago, in September of 2019.

In the cultivated meat-making process, the nutrient-rich growth medium fed to cells triggers those cells to grow into muscle, fat, and tissue, all of which are put together to create a final end product. A company might grow fat cells for use in its own meat analogues, or it could sell the fat as an ingredient to other businesses. Fat is also a crucial component in achieving a “meatier” taste, texture, and mouthfeel when it comes to cultured protein.  

Mosa Meat, of course, is well known as the company that created the world’s first cultivated hamburger back in 2013 — for a cool $325,000. A huge part of this cost was (and still is for many) the growth medium, which at the time was made using fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is as expensive as it is controversial. As the Good Food Institute puts it, “The use of animal-derived components in cultivated meat production has prohibitive economic, food safety, and ethical constraints.”

In July of last year, Mosa Meat said it had achieved a more than 80x cost reduction for its growth media, a milestone largely driven by the company’s ability to develop FBS-free media. The company now uses an “animal component free” media that is part of the reason the Fat Team was able to announce its own cost reductions recently.

“We’ve definitely checked yet another box on our journey towards a product that meets the expectations of critical meat lovers,” company cofounder Peter Verstrate said in this weekend’s announcement. 

Mosa Meat’s announcement comes not long after MeaTech 3D, an Israeli company, said it would produce cultivated fat at a new pilot production facility. Additionally, last month Mission Barns raised $24 million to build up a production facility in San Francisco for its cultivated fat business. Meanwhile, multiple companies, from Avant Meats to Future Meat, have announced price slashes in production costs over the last several months.

Lowering costs, whether of fat, medium, or other components, will help the entire cultured meat industry get products closer to price parity with their traditional counterparts. Price parity is only of many other milestones that have to be achieved in order to make cultivated meat a commercial reality. However, it is seen by many as an extremely crucial step in the process. 

Mosa Meat doesn’t yet have a timeframe for when it might have burgers in front of customers, or how much they’ll cost once that happens. At last check, the company was working with European regulators to get approval for its products. 

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

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Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

Mosa Meat Closes $85M Series B Round

Mosa Meat announced today it has raised $10 million in a third and final closing of its Series B round, bringing the round’s total to $85 million. Nutreco and Just Eat Takeaway.com CEO Jitse Groen participated in the third closing, while the entire B round was led by Blue Horizon Ventures.

The closing follows a $55 million fundraise in September 2020, which was also part of the Series B round. The company’s total funding to date is $96 million.

Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is credited with having created the world’s first lab-grown hamburger back in 2013 to the tune of $325,000 in production costs for that single burger. The company brought that number significantly down last year when it achieved an 80x reduction in the cost of their product’s growth medium, which is typically the most expensive part of the cell-based meat-making process. A big part of this reduced cost was removing the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS), the expensive and highly controversial growth medium from which many cell-based meat companies are now distancing themselves.

The funds from Mosa’s Series B round will go towards extending the company’s pilot production facility in Maastricht, Netherlands, as well as towards developing “an industrial-sized production line” and building out the Mosa Meat team.

 The end goal, of course, is to get its meat products to customers. No date has yet been announced for that. Currently, the company is working with European regulators to demonstrate the safety of cell-based meat and get regulatory approval.

Mosa’s Series B round is the latest development in what has already been a busy year in the world of cell-based meat investments. In February alone, Israel’s Future Meat raised $26.75 million, New Age Meats extended its seed round by $2 million, and Redefine meat closed a $29 million Series A round.  

Mosa Meat Raises $55M for Cell-Based Burgers

Mosa Meat, the Netherlands-based company known for creating the world’s first lab-grown hamburger, announced today it has raised $55 million as part of a larger Series B round. The round was led by Blue Horizon Ventures with participation from Bell Food Group, M Ventures, and others. 

Earlier this year, the company said it had achieved a more than 80x reduction in the cost of the growth medium it uses for its lab-grown meat. That’s one heck of a reduction, considering the Mosa Meat’s original hamburger cost $325,000. The company also opened a new pilot production plant.

Especially noteworthy is that in 2019, Mosa Meat successfully removed Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), which is both expensive and ethically controversial, from its growth medium. According to a company blog post from July, removing FBS from the medium helped bring down overall costs, which in turn gets Mosa Meat closer to achieving price parity with traditional meat. Reaching that price parity will be crucial to selling the average consumer on the idea of eating burgers and other meats grown in a lab. Achieving the right texture and taste are also critical components for cell-based meat products.

The cell-based meat category has seen a huge uptick in investment over the last several months, and for more than just burgers. IntegriCulture, a company making lab-grown foie gras, raised $7.4 million in May and got a $2.2 million grant in August. BlueNalu raised $20 million in February for its cell-based seafood. Overall, the cell-based meat category has received more than $290 million in investment for 2020.

Mosa Meat says it will use its new funds to extend its current pilot production facility, expand its team, and develop an industrial-sized production line. It will also “introduce delicious cultivated beef to consumers,” though no specific date for that is set. For now, the company said it will work with European regulators to demonstrate the safety of cell-based meat and get regulatory approval to “serve consumers in Europe who are craving change.”

The Food Tech Show: Ghost Kitchens, $1 Keto Cookies & the Magical Egg Cooker

The Spoon editors got together to talk about some of the most interesting food tech news of the past week (as well as complain about high-priced cookies).

Some of the stories we talk about on the pod include:

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the show direct to your device or just click play below.

Mosa Meat Achieves 80x Reduction in Medium Cost For Creating Lab-Grown Meat

It seems the team that created the world’s first lab-grown hamburger has achieved another milestone that could help usher in a post-industrial meat era.

Mosa Meat announced today they have achieved an 80x reduction in the cost of the growth medium for their lab-grown meat. According to the announcement, the achievement was driven by the company’s “Media Optimisation” team.

Mosa Meat is famously founded by Mark Post and Peter Verstrate, the same Dutch research team that created the world’s first cultured meat in 2013. A nascent cultured meat industry has sprung up since those early days and now, as the world’s industrial meat supply comes under increasing strain, the same team that brought us the $325,000 hamburger is working towards achieving a scale of production that could one day match that of the industrial meat processing world.

To achieve that scale, one of the key gating factors will be a reduction in the cost of the growth medium, the nutrient “soup” that feeds the animal cells so they can replicate. Part of that transition is to move away from FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum), something Mosa announced they had achieved last year. FBS is the standard growth medium used by the cultured meat industry, but it is both expensive and seen as inhumane since it is gathered from the blood of pregnant dairy cows at slaughter.

With the reduction in cost of growth medium and the launch of a new pilot production plant, Mosa Meat is attempting to build a foundation to produce cultured meat at a price closer to that of Big Mac than that famous first burger created in a lab almost 10 years ago. This vision of a scalable cultured meat future is a large reason why the company was able to raise an additional €5 million earlier this month from Bell Food Group, further upping the investment by one of the largest meat processors in Europe.

Is Cultured Meat the Future?

Tofu. Seitan. Tempeh. Blech. Current meat substitutes are—how can I say this—disgusting. And we all know that vegan cheezburger tastes nothing like a real burger or real cheese. But as Impossible Foods’ bleeding burger shows us, the landscape is changing rapidly. The next big trend? Cultured meat.

What the heck is cultured meat? Companies across the globe want to make real meat by growing a small tissue biopsy taken from a real animal (without hurting it) into a larger steak or chicken breast. Each has its own unique device to grow the biopsy and plans to market the product to grocery stores, restaurants, and even individual customers around the globe.

Of course, no one has made cultured meat at scale quite yet: They’re all about five years away from a finished product. SuperMeat, an Israeli biotechnology startup, raised over $200,000 and is now at the beginning of its R&D to create cultured chicken meat. Mosa Meat, a Dutch company, is working on ground beef and in 2013 made a single burger that cost more than $300,000 to produce. Meanwhile Memphis Meats, a California-based startup, is making cultured beef and pork and made a few meatballs earlier this year.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Though we’re pretty far away from an actual usable technology, the concept has deep implications. Vegans and animal rights groups like the idea that animals don’t have to suffer for us to eat meat, and those concerned with sustainability like the idea that we could produce meat without such a high tax on our land, water, and other natural resources.

So what do you think? Would you eat a burger made of cultured meat?