MAASTRICHT - Start-up company Mosa Meat, fronted by the Dutch professor Mark Post, is growing hamburgers in a laboratory. Post expects the ‘lab grown’ meat to be available for general consumption within three years. He was - in 2013 - the first who successfully managed to create a hamburger in a laboratory.
To grow a hamburger, Post removed a piece of muscle tissue from a cow, then allowed the cells to multiply into a 100% meat hamburger; lab grown, not harvested from a dead animal. At the beginning of summer, Post founded Mosa Meat to produce laboratory grown meat for mass consumption; with the aim of entering the market in a few years time. The main focus point is cost reduction, as the first burger cost a whopping 250.000 euro to create.
Post aims to market the burgers for consumption in three years time, with each burger costing eleven euros. Within eight years, the lab grown burgers should be able to compete in pricing with ‘regular’ meat found in the supermarket. “We are currently in our second venture round, which should allow us to upscale our technology further”, states Post. “Within three to four years, Mosa Meat will grow meat in tanks half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Those bioreactors will allows us to grow around 10.000 kilos of meat each year.”
