With the opening of a new pilot factory for cultured burgers on the edge of the Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus, Mosa Meat is taking an important step toward market introduction.
The biggest hurdle is approval by the food safety authorities at home and abroad. According to Brightlands Campus, the scoop will probably go to Singapore, where, with some luck, the cultured burger will be on the menu of the better restaurants in a year.
The first run will start on May 18
In the middle of the nitrogen crisis, the news is welcomed with open arms that it only takes a few cells from a cow to grow tens of thousands of hamburgers. On a small scale, Mosa Meat has grown a few stem cells, muscle cells, and fat cells from a cow into a full-fledged, tasty hamburger within a month. Now it’s time to scale up that process. The new pilot plant will eventually be able to produce hundreds of thousands of burgers per year, as a precursor to an even larger factory that should be able to grow millions of hamburgers in about three years. The first ‘run’ in the new pilot factory will start on May 18, a stone’s throw from the Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus lab where this adventure started.
How it started
The start of this large-scale production is an exciting moment for Peter Verstrate, who has been involved in developing cultured meat from the beginning: “About 20 years ago, Willem van Eelen received a subsidy of two million euros from the government to conduct research into cultured meat. The government demanded that he’d involve a market party in his research. That became Stegeman, where I was the director at the time. I immediately knew: ‘I have to be here!’ I found it a fascinating development from the start, just like researcher Mark Post, who joined the project halfway through. When the subsidy ran out after four years, Mark and his team continued their research in the Maastricht University lab. He managed to grow pieces of tissue, and I used my knowledge as a food technologist to turn it into a hamburger.”
The first burger was world news
The first cultured burger – paid for by Google founder Sergey Brin – became world news in 2013. A few years later – in 2016 – Mark and Peter founded Mosa Meat with the help of the Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus, which became a shareholder. Peter: “Until that moment, we had mainly focused on our product. But now, suddenly, a lot more came at us. We had to provide annual figures, conclude employment contracts and make legally binding agreements with investors. In that start-up phase, it was very nice for us to fall back on the Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus experts. They were ready to advise and act in the field of HR, communication, finance, and legal affairs. They gave us the perfect kick-start.”
The Mosa Campus
Mosa Meat still carries out much of the fundamental research into tissue formation at the Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus. In addition, they rent three buildings on the Watermolen on the edge of the campus, where they further develop and scale up their technology. “We have started our own campus here: our Center for Advanced Meat Production, Upscaling and Sustainable: or simply the Mosa CAMPUS. We share much of our knowledge about cultured meat production with other companies. It may not seem smart to make your competitor wiser than he is, but we need other companies to get this movement going globally. We will reap the benefits ourselves.”
Eat? No, further development first
The first burgers that will be ready in a few weeks in the pilot factory will not be eaten by anyone. “No, we mainly use it to further develop the product and to analyze it extensively. We need those analyses to convince the responsible authorities of the safety of cultured meat. It is quite a complicated and time-consuming procedure to get that approval. In Europe, that could take a few years.” By then, the Mosa CAMPUS will most likely have already been expanded with a second, fully-fledged factory. So that production can immediately be scaled up to millions of hamburgers per year after approval.
Remaining a technology company
Peter Verstrate: “This does not mean that we have the ambition to supply cultured meat to the world. Others are allowed to do that with our technology. Because we are primarily a technology company. But we must first refine that technology by cultivating citizens on a larger scale. And soon also steaks. Because that is our next challenge.”
160 people who are super driven
The opening of the pilot plant is an important step towards a world in which we no longer eat one and a half billion cows. And that step was celebrated in style. “We made it a great party together. On a day like this, you feel the energy of all those 160 employees from 30 different countries, who are all very driven to make this a success. I have never experienced such a corporate culture before. Really fantastic… Together we watched how top chef Hans van Wolde, part of our product development team, symbolically prepared the first cultured burger. It is a pity that no one was allowed to taste it, but hopefully, that will not be long.”
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