Growth Medium without Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS)

We are thrilled to be featured in the latest episode of Vox Media’s popular Netflix series, “Explained”. And, because it’s very important to us, we want to update one piece of information. We in fact are now using growth media without any FBS, or any other animal products. 

As the episode explains, cells are often grown in media containing what is called “Fetal Bovine Serum” (FBS). It provides the cells with lots of nutrients and other parts of a comfortable environment they love to be in to grow. That’s why it has been the main “growth medium component” used by tissue engineers in the medical field for decades. 

But, for us, it’s morally unacceptable. As “Explained” shows, FBS is derived from blood collected from the calves of pregnant dairy cows at slaughter. One of the reasons that we started Mosa Meat – for many in our team the main reason – was to help reduce the suffering of animals. We used a tiny amount of FBS for our 2013 hamburger, trying to work out whether the science was even possible. But it was non-negotiable to us from the very start that when scaling up, the growth media would not contain any animal components. For ethical reasons, as well as for the simple reason FBS is very expensive, and we could never produce meat at large scale for a broadly accessible price.

Therefore, the scientists in our Medium team have been working to completely remove FBS and all other animal components from our growth media. There were no equivalents that worked as well, so this has been no small feat. And we’re really happy to be able to say that we’ve succeeded in developing our own entirely animal component-free growth media, which are performing really well. In some conditions they’re even outperforming FBS-based media.

We still have lots of work to do, but overcoming this major scientific hurdle brings us closer to deliver on our mission to let you enjoy healthy, delicious meat that’s sustainable and kind to animals.