 | |
| Company type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Food technology |
| Founded | May 2016 |
| Founders | Peter Verstrate, Mark Post |
| Headquarters | , The Netherlands |
| Website | mosameat |
Mosa Meat is a Dutch food technology company, headquartered in Maastricht, Netherlands, creating production methods for cultured meat. [1] It was founded in May 2016. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Co-founder Mark Post is a Professor of Sustainable Industrial Tissue Engineering at Maastricht University [6] and serves as Chief Scientific Officer at Mosa Meat. [7] [8] Co-founder Peter Verstrate is a food technologist [8] with a background in the processed meat industry, holding different positions at Sara Lee Corporation, Ahold, Smithfield Foods, Campofrío Food Group, Jack Links, and Hulshof Protein Technologies.[ citation needed ] He first served as CEO at Mosa Meat, and as of July 2019 is its chief operating officer, Maarten Bosch having succeeded him as CEO. [8] [9] Mosa Meat has several divisions including the Fat Team (led by Laura Jackisch), the Muscle Team, the (stem cell) Isolation Team and the Scale Team. [8] The company had grown to about 120 employees (representing 23 nationalities) by February 2022 across science, engineering, operations and business roles. [10]
'We proved already in 2013 that we can make a hamburger. Now it’s all about scaling up and getting the cost where it should be. That’s exactly what this phase is all about.
– Maarten Bosch, Mosa Meat (2020), https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/lab-meat-is-getting-closer-to-supermarket-shelves
The team of scientists headed by Post and Verstrate developed the world's first cultured meat hamburger in 2013, which cost €250,000 (US$330,000 [8] ) to produce and was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. [11] The production process took three laboratory technicians three months to grow the 20,000 individual muscle fibers that made up the burger. [12]
In February 2017, the company set itself the goal to reduce the production costs to 60 euros per kilogram by 2020. [13]
In July 2018, Mosa Meat announced that it had raised a €7.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by M Ventures and Bell Food Group. [14]
In February 2020, the startup estimated it could enter the market in 2022. [15] In May 2020, Mosa Meat had begun installing its pilot plant in Maastricht. [16] In 2020, Mosa Meat announced an 88 times cost reduction of their medium (the broth that feeds the cells) [17] and in 2021, Mosa Meat announced a 65 times cost reduction of their fat medium, making animal fat that is 98% cheaper than their previous method. [18] [19]
In September 2020, the company obtained €45.4 million (55 million US dollars) from various investors, and in December 2020, it attracted another 16.5 million euros (20 million US dollars). Investors included Blue Horizon Ventures, the Bell Food Group, and Mitsubishi. Mosa Meat said it would spend the money on expanding its pilot plant in Maastricht and hiring more personnel. [20] In January 2021, Mosa Meat indicated it would initiate the regulatory approval procedure for its product with the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) during that year. [21]
In February 2021, Mosa Meat closed its Series B funding round at $85 million. The round included Jitse Groen from Just Eat Takeaway. [22]
By March 2021, Mosa Meat had secured over 70 million euros in funding from various investors including Nutreco and Just Eat Takeaway CEO Jitse Groen. [23] In September 2021, actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio announced that he had funded Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms for undisclosed amounts of money, stating: 'One of the most impactful ways to combat the climate crisis is to transform our food system. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms offer new ways to satisfy the world's demand for beef, while solving some of the most pressing issues of current industrial beef production.' [24]
In September 2021 Leonardo DiCaprio joined Mosa Meat as an investor and an advisor. [24] [25] [8]
One month later in October 2021, the European Union invested €2 million towards developing cultured beef for commercial markets. [26]
Originally, the start-up worked with a 100-millilitre tank. [10] By November 2021, Mosa was producing a few kilograms of meat a month (in 40-litre tanks) in order to prepare for submitting an application for the EFSA's regulatory approval within the next six months. [10] In the near future, they sought to produce 100 kilograms per month (or 1,200 kilograms year) per 200-litre bioreactors. [27] [28] The last step would be 10,000-litre tanks, [10] which would be scalable to 180,000 kilograms a year. [28]
In January 2022, Mosa Meat published a peer-reviewed paper [29] on how to achieve muscle differentiation in cultured meat without the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) and without genetically modifying the cells. [30]
Mosa Meat is focused on making ground beef products. [8] The meat-making process begins by taking peppercorn-size samples of cells from Limousin cows. The cells are then isolated into muscle or fat and fed on a nutrient-dense growth medium, eventually resembling ground hamburger meat with the exact same genetic code as the cows. [8] In May 2021, Mosa Meat hosted a tasting of its cultivated fat. Co-founder Peter Verstrate described Mosa fat as having an "overwhelming animal signature" even more potent than conventional fat. [31]
Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat among other names, is a form of cellular agriculture where meat is produced by culturing animal cells in vitro. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques pioneered in regenerative medicine. Jason Matheny popularized the concept in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat has the potential to address the environmental impact of meat production, animal welfare, food security and human health, in addition to its potential mitigation of climate change.
New Harvest is a donor-funded research institute dedicated to the field of cellular agriculture, focusing on advances in scientific research efforts surrounding cultured animal products. Its research aims to resolve growing environmental and ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock production.
Just Eat Takeaway.com N.V. is a Dutch multinational online food ordering and delivery company, formed from the merger of London-based Just Eat and Amsterdam-based Takeaway.com in 2020. It is the parent company of food delivery brands including Takeaway.com, Lieferando, Thuisbezorgd.nl, Pyszne.pl, 10bis in Israel, and those acquired from Just Eat, including SkipTheDishes and Menulog. Since the merger, the company has acquired Grubhub in the United States and Bistro.sk. Just Eat Takeaway operate various food ordering and delivery platforms in twenty countries, where customers can order food online from restaurants’ menus, and have it delivered by restaurant or company couriers directly to their home or workplace using an app or website. The company also partners with IFood in Brazil and Colombia.
Eat Just, Inc. is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, California, US. It develops and markets plant-based alternatives to conventionally produced egg products, as well as cultivated meat products. Eat Just was founded in 2011 by Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk. It raised about $120 million in early venture capital and became a unicorn in 2016 by surpassing a $1 billion valuation. It has been involved in several highly publicized disputes with traditional egg industry interests. In December 2020, its cultivated chicken meat became the first cultured meat to receive regulatory approval in Singapore. Shortly thereafter, Eat Just's cultured meat was sold to diners at the Singapore restaurant 1880, making it the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat".
Beyond Meat, Inc. is a Los Angeles–based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown. The company's initial products were launched in the United States in 2012. The company went public in 2019, becoming the first plant-based meat analogue company to go public.
Upside Foods is a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California, aiming to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti (CEO), Nicholas Genovese (CSO), and Will Clem. Valeti was a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture.
SuperMeat is an Israeli startup company working to develop a "meal-ready" chicken cultured meat product created through the use of cell culture.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Marcus Johannes "Mark" Post is a Dutch pharmacologist who is Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. On 5 August 2013, he was the first in the world to present a proof of concept for cultured meat. In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the ninth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era.
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna.
Aleph Farms is a cellular agriculture company active in the food technology space. It was co-founded in 2017 by the Israeli food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" of Strauss Group Ltd., and Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel.
Jitse Groen is a Dutch businessman and the founder of Takeaway.com, a food delivery platform. He is the chief executive officer of Just Eat Takeaway.com.
Willem Frederik van Eelen was a Dutch researcher and businessperson, who pioneered the creation and development of cultured meat. He is recognized as one of the "godfathers of cultured meat".
Vow is an Australian company that plans to grow cultured meat for commercial distribution.
Believer Meats, from 2018 to 2022 known as Future Meat Technologies, or Future Meat for short, is a biotechnology firm which produces cultured meat from chicken cells and is working on cultured lamb kebabs and beef burgers. Based in Israel, its main office is located in Jerusalem, while its primary production facility is operating in Rehovot. Future Meat Technologies mainly seeks to supply hardware and cell lines to manufacturers of cultured meat rather than directly selling food products to consumers. In November 2022, Future Meat Technologies rebranded to Believer Meats.
Wildtype is an American seafood company that produces cultivated seafood from fish cells. Its headquarters is located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California and includes a former microbrewery that has been converted into Wildtype's first Fishery where their cultivated seafood is produced. Wildtype's first product is cultivated Pacific salmon that will offer several benefits when compared to conventionally-harvested fish.
Steakholder Foods is a company which develops 3D bioprinting technologies for usage in cellular agriculture. Based in Israel, it has a Belgian subsidiary called Peace of Meat, with which it produces cultured meat, with a focus on cultivating foie gras. It was originally founded in 2019 as MeaTech 3D Ltd., or MeaTech for short.
Meatable is a Dutch biotechnology company aimed at cultured meat, particularly pork.
Mirai Foods is a food technology company which produces cultivated meat from beef cells. It is headquartered in Wädenswil in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland, and was founded in 2019.