Mosa Meat’s Mark Post on the first lab-grown burger and the future of cultivated meat

The idea of cultivated meat has been around for nearly a century. The concept of growing meat, rather than taking it from animal carcasses, has been present in imaginations ranging from science fiction writers to Winston Churchill.

Yet actual cultivated meat has not existed for very long at all. The first cultivated burger was developed in the Netherlands as recently as 2013.

Mark Post, the man behind this creation, is still a major player in the cultivated meat world and is optimistic about its future. He speaks with confidence about its potential to buttress food security, mitigate the overwhelming demand for meat and help reduce its environmental impact.

Now working as Chief Scientific Officer for Mosa Meat, a Dutch cultivated beef company that he co-founded, Post has spent most of his life in academia and still trains an academic eye on the cultivated meat sector.

This is, of course, a sector where science and technology are central. Unlike in well-established industries, the bottlenecks faced by cultivated meat are scientific as well as commercial.

Yet in little over a decade, cultivated meat has come a long way. Now, it is edging closer and closer to large-scale commercial viability in Europe.

The origins of cultivated meat

While Post is a medical doctor by training, he has spent most of his life as a medical researcher in the cardiovascular field, while also working as a university lecturer both in the Netherlands and the US.

He came to cultivated meat through tissue engineering. While producing blood vessels through a process that uses cells to create vessel tissue, he “more or less by coincidence” came across the opportunity to do the same for meat. Viewing it as having potentially “bigger societal impact” than what he was already working on, he took it on.

In the early stages of the development of the first cultivated burger, Post worked with the late Willem van Eelen, who is often described as the ‘Godfather of cultivated meat’. Van Eelen, who had been passionate about the topic since the Second World War, first filed a patent for the production of meat through culturing cells in 1997.

When Post began working with Van Eelen, he was involved in an early cultivated meat project, which at the time was called ‘in vitro meat’. Post was not initially involved, but when the local project manager fell ill, he stepped into her place. After the project ended, he continued to work in the area, becoming “more and more hooked” on the topic.

Soon, the project drew the interest of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, whose backing allowed the first cultivated burger to be developed.

Developing the first cultivated burger

So what were the main challenges of developing the first cultivated burger?

“The main challenge is that it was very tedious work,” Post jokes. “With an academic group of people who are always doing new stuff and not really prepared and trained to produce something, they all of a sudden had to make 10,000 strands of cultivated muscle and put them in a hamburger.”

Boredom was not the only challenge the team faced, however; there were technical difficulties too.

At that point, even scaling up the technology to create a single hamburger was difficult. The Maastricht University lab where the researchers were based was not equipped for such development, and building a lone burger took about three months.

The founding of Mosa Meat

Once the first cultivated burger was presented, it was greeted with a slew of enthusiasm from investors and philanthropists, Post explains. The research backers were keen to take advantage of its commercial potential.

“Sergey Brin said ‘this needs to become a company, sooner rather than later’,” says Post, who at the time was happy in academia. It took around three years before the company started.

But, as when the initial burger was being produced, the problems lay partly in the fact that the university wasn’t equipped to house the operations of a commercial company, Post explains.

Despite support from figures like billionaire Brin, sourcing funding, infrastructure and staff was a significant challenge. “We had to basically start from zero. Zero funding, zero people, just the labs of the university,” says Post.

The company has come a long way since then, having already reached the point where it is submitting applications for regulatory approval in the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) in the EU.

If it receives regulatory approval for its cultivated fat, the application for which it submitted last year, it may next submit an application for a fully fledged cultivated burger. This will likely be a blended product (part plant-based meat), much like the original 2013 burger.

Overcoming technical challenges

Cultivated meat has now moved beyond the initial university-lab stage, but technical challenges persist.

Producing cultivated meat is an expensive and complex process. The industry has overcome a wide range of technical challenges since its inception a little over a decade ago, but there is still a long way to go.

Two challenges predominate, Post explains. Firstly, all the ingredients of cultivated meat must be replaced with plant-based equivalents, except for the starter cells, which are by nature animal-derived.

Secondly, the sector must reduce the cost of its different production components.

Cultivated meat has been successful in cost reduction. In collaboration with a range of third-party companies, the sector has reduced the cost of the medium, or broth, which provides essential nutrients to grow the animal cells. It has also reduced the cost of artificially-created recombinant proteins 1000-fold.

Once it reaches the market in Europe, the price of cultivated meat will not initially be competitive with either meat or pure plant-based meat, as production must still be scaled. Nevertheless, predicts Post, “it will be reasonable. It will not be so exclusive that only a happy few can pay for it”.

The advantages of cultivated meat

Much ink has been spilled over the various advantages and disadvantages of cultivated meat. To Post, the advantages of cultivated meat are threefold.

Firstly, when compared to conventional meat, the benefits are environmental. Cultivated meat has a much lower environmental impact than conventional meat, Post stresses.

Secondly, when compared to plant-based meat, the benefits are nutritional. Cultivated meat, unlike plant-based meat, contains animal proteins. Animal proteins are complete proteins, unlike most proteins sourced from plants.

Cultivated meat has “the wholesomeness of animal proteins, which a lot of vegetable proteins don’t have”, he says.

Lastly, it “brings with it a natural meat taste that you would otherwise have to recreate with a fairly large number of ingredients to make a plant-based hamburger taste like meat”. It replaces meat with a “much more credible product” than plant-based does, Post says, as it contains animal proteins.

Responding to farmer scepticism

Cultivated meat has faced a lot of scepticism. While views are nuanced among many consumers, it is often labelled ‘frankenfood’ and distrusted due to perceived artificiality.

High-profile bans in Italy and Florida in the US have put it in the spotlight.

When it comes to farmers, many have a nuanced view of cultivated meat, seeing it as potentially beneficial for society. Nevertheless, they are concerned about their own livelihoods, as well as the potential for cultivated meat to give overwhelming power to corporations and take control away from local hands. What would Post say to a farmer with such concerns?

The transition to cultivated meat “will not happen overnight”, he says. “This will take decades. You will have time to adjust.”

Furthermore, he stresses that “we will always need food. We will always need the soil that you work to produce that food”.

Farmers will not be excluded from the sector either. They can collaborate with the cultivated meat sector, he says, and get involved in production.

Indeed, start-ups such as Respect Farms and Meatosys are aiming to produce cultivated meat on a farm, putting production in the midst of conventional agriculture.

The future of cultivated meat

With all that being said, why is cultivated meat the future?

“Cultivated meat is the future because we have no choice,” says Post. “Currently, meat production is unsustainable and it will increasingly be that way because of increased demand for meat. We don’t have a lot of choice.”

This is not the same for all meat: it is worse for beef than chicken, for example. But the problem exists across the board.

With this in mind, says Post, the choices we have are either all becoming vegetarian or finding a suitable replacement for meat.

At the heart of the argument in favour of cultivated meat, then, is its benefit for the planet.

“My major drive is an environmental drive. We need to make sure that this planet is still a habitable place for the next couple of centuries to come.”

If we don’t address the environmental impact that meat has on the planet, he says, we may lose it.