Mosameat, a spinout of Maastricht University, has been set up to commercialise lab-grown burgers with a view to bring the patties to market by 2020.
The burgers were originally unveiled by professor Mark Post and his team two years ago in London with a burger that took £215,000 ($324,770) to produce. Now, Mosameat looks to utilise the same technology to make cost-effective burgers which can be sold to the public.
Mosameat is currently looking to raise €10m ($10.73m) in its first venturing round which it will use to build a production facility. Should it prove successful, it will find competition from fellow spinout Impossible Foods, launched from Stanford, which recently raised $108m from investors including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and plants to bring its meat-free burger make from altered proteins and nuts to resemble the taste and texture of meat to market by 2016.
Aside from animal welfare concerns frequently voiced by the vegetarian community, lab-grown meat and meat replacement products like Impossible will possibly play a major role in tackling environmental issues in the years ahead. The world’s 1.5bn cattle produce 18% of greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transport put together, according to a study published in 2012 by the US Food and Agricultural Organisation, Livestock’s Long Shadow.
Post predicts that cultured meat will eventually phase out regular livestock farming over the next five years: “I think in the long run when we have the product essentially the same, the animal welfare aspect will mean you’ll see a gradual phase out of the traditional market. I may be reading too much into it but in the absence of any really hard-core, aggressively-voiced objections I hope there is potential to collaborate with the meat industry and co-develop this.”
