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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mosa Meat

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:

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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?