Cultivating Meat: The Mosa Approach
The past decade has seen the emergence of the field of cultivated meat. When we unveiled the world’s very first cultivated beef burger, grown directly from cow cells, it marked the birth of our field with a tangible proof of concept. Since then, several cultivated meat and seafood companies have been founded. In Singapore, a cultivated chicken product has been approved for sales, and in the U.S. the FDA confirmed safety of another cultivated chicken product.
We are now approaching a new pivotal phase for our nascent industry: commercialisation. Therefore, we want to reflect on the state of the field and share our vision on the key factors for success in the upcoming years.
The Aim: Replace Meat with Meat
At Mosa Meat, we believe that only swapping meat with meat has the potential for mass consumer adoption. And, large scale adoption is needed to solve the sustainability issues currently associated with our food system.
Meat eaters haven’t significantly altered their habits, despite decades of optimization in plant-based meat replacements by a growing number of well-funded companies and marketing campaigns stating “we are meat”. The percentage of voluntary vegan/vegetarian diets in the population within many countries is still in the single digits. The protein transition our planet requires is not happening quickly enough and the current shifts in consumer behaviour are not expected to restore the balance between what we consume and what our planet can sustain.
For real progress in the protein transition, new solutions are needed to give consumers exactly what they expect from meat. The true potential of cultivated meat is that consumers can keep eating the products they love, exactly as they are doing now — and we don’t need to bet on massive global consumer behavioural change to reduce the current negative externalities of meat consumption. This is the primary reason Mosa Meat was founded.
Cultivating Real Meat
In order to replace conventional meat with cultivated meat, it needs to achieve parity in composition, nutritional value, culinary experience, and cost. This is considered the ‘holy grail’ of cellular agriculture. Many scientific and engineering advances are required to reach this point. To rise to the challenge, we have brought together the largest scientific team working on cultivated meat globally. Our team of over 100 scientists and food specialists work directly with our co-founders Prof. Dr. Mark Post and Peter Verstrate, who are both actively involved in the pioneering work that is taking place at Mosa Meat every day.
Many companies have emerged over the past years and multiple approaches to making cultivated meat are being explored at the moment. We feel it is important to clarify some of the fundamental differences in these approaches, in order to increase the chances of shared success within our field.
Below, we dive into some of the fundamental principles behind our approach and why we believe they contribute to higher product quality and improve the scalability of cultivated meat.
Mosa Burger, 2022
1. Select Cells that Add Value
Many types of animal cells can be used to start the cultivation process, originating from different parts of an animal and each leading to different functionality in the end product. Of course, we want to use those cells that have the potential to provide the right nutritional value and the same culinary benefits to consumers. This is the case when using muscle precursor (myosatellite) cells and fat precursor cells that are committed to only become muscle or fat tissue. There are other components in meat, like connective tissue (e.g., cells called fibroblasts that develop into skin/collagen), but apart from providing a form of texture, they do not provide the key characteristics that consumers expect from meat.
Ultimately, we believe it is not enough to use just any animal cells in a product. We want them to provide the exact functionality appreciated in meat.
2. Differentiate Cells into Mature Muscle Fibres and Fat Tissue
The cultivation process takes place in two key phases: the first is when individual cells multiply from tens of thousands to trillions of cells (the ‘proliferation’ phase), and the second phase is when they fuse together and become tissue (the ‘differentiation’ phase). The key to making real meat is this second, differentiation phase.
Muscle cells can only become the familiar fibres that we recognize as the structure of meat and produce the meat-specific proteins that provide important nutritional value, when they fully differentiate. This is relevant for ground meat products, but even more important to ultimately produce whole cuts.
Our differentiated muscle cells (7 days maturity) with nuclei (blue) and muscle specific proteins f-actin (red) and myosin (green).
Fat precursor cells can become fat cells (adipocytes) and eventually fat tissue through a process called adipogenesis, where fat molecules called lipids build up to form large droplets inside the cells. To our knowledge we are the only cultivated meat company that achieved true adipogenesis during differentiation instead of ‘feeding’ cells lipids to improve their composition. We believe that using only undifferentiated cells won't provide enough value to consumers in terms of the taste experience and aromas of mature fat tissue since the total lipid content and composition will be very different from that of conventional beef fat.
Compared to those in our field that don’t differentiate their cells, we use a longer and more elaborate process. We see it as giving our beef enough time to mature. Consumers will expect our beef to be identical to conventional beef and we know consumers will be able to tell the difference.
3. Enable the Cells to Grow Naturally
There are many reasons why it can be appealing to use genetic modification techniques or ‘immortalization’ in the cells to make them behave in a more desirable way. For example, to let them perform more doublings, or become more robust or more efficient in their metabolism. However, we see that such changes to the cells commonly reduce the capacity of the cells to differentiate into mature tissues. Further genetic modification is often required to make immortalised cells differentiate. At Mosa Meat we've established it is scientifically not necessary to genetically modify cells to cultivate beef and our models to reach significant scale are not based on any modifications or immortalization. Our estimate is that for each sample of fresh beef (0,5 g) we take, we can produce up to 80.000 hamburgers.
As described above, we select muscle and fat precursor cells, rather than embryonic stem cells which can develop into many different types of cells and are near immortal – reducing the need for genetic modification or immortalisation. But, they typically require a lot of guidance throughout the growth process to ultimately become mature muscle and fat tissue, and we have not seen convincing differentiation for the embryonic stem cells of cows. Our approach of using the cells that are already committed to become muscle and fat allows for a shorter and less complex path to full maturity.
Apart from the process and product quality implications of modifying cells, we have always been mindful of the complexity it can add to regulatory processes and consumer acceptance. There are multiple regions in the world (like the EU and China) where genetically modified products require significantly longer approval times to enter the market, if they can even enter the market at all. These dynamics limit the geographic scaling potential of cultivated meat. In other words, it’s not possible to have a global impact if Europe or China can’t be served.
The argument could be made that this approach has the disadvantage of having to go back to a donor animal once in a while. However, we see it as a great advantage in that the quality of our cells is protected by the best possible guarantee - a healthy, living animal. Unlike in the case of immortalised cell lines, we don’t need to worry about mutations accumulating over time, so-called ‘genetic drift’. Furthermore, going back to the donor animal is not cost prohibitive in any case, as we can grow many cells from a single biopsy, obtaining enough doublings to reach industrial scale
Realising the Biggest Impact
Delivering on the promise of cultivated meat means keeping a strong focus on those factors that ultimately impact the climate footprint, as well as animal welfare and societal benefits. Below, we outline some of the focus areas we see for Mosa Meat and the broader industry.
1. Start with beef
Cultivated meat is a more sustainable production option than conventional meat, when done correctly. The numbers in life-cycle analyses like that of CE Delft and others are very promising. Compared to the production of slaughtered beef, cultivated beef could reduce climate impact by 92%, air pollution by 93%, while using 95% less land and 78% less water.
We are very aware that these are the footprint reductions for beef production, where the differences are much larger than for any other type of meat. We know cows are highly inefficient. It takes 25 Kg of dry feed to produce 1 Kg of meat – pigs are four times as efficient and chickens are 7.5 times as efficient. Cows use the most resources, generate the most greenhouse gas emissions (mainly because of methane production, which is specific for ruminants) and have the most deleterious impact on the planet. As sustainability has been a core motivation for our founders to start Mosa Meat, we stay committed to solve for beef first.
Our approach is optimised to ultimately enable the creation of cultivated whole-cuts like steak. And of course, over time we will be able to explore production of other types of meat, fish, and materials like leather, as the technology required will be similar to what we are now developing.
2. Animal-Free Cell Feed
The fact that animal slaughter is not required anymore to produce meat is a strong reason for people to be excited about cellular agriculture. To reduce the dependence on animals in our food system, we have been committed to removing animal components from our cell feed. In 2019, we shared a significant milestone: we successfully removed fetal bovine serum (FBS) and other animal components from our process. In January of 2022, we published a peer-reviewed article in Nature Food that revealed how we achieve muscle differentiation without the use of FBS. The paper includes descriptions of processes and differentiation medium ingredients that have worked well for us.
As there is still continued debate around this topic, we will continue to publish fundamental insights on cell feed development and the removal of FBS, pushing forward the scientific basis of our industry, and we encourage other cultivated meat companies to do the same.
3. Partner to Build a Healthy Value Chain
To realise a positive impact at the scale of our global food system is an enormous task. The value chain for cellular agriculture is being shaped at the moment and it will take some time to mature and get to significant scale. We are proud to work together with incredible partners in several parts of the value chain in the following ways:
We work with livestock farmers to select the best cells.
We work with animal feed company Nutreco for the optimization and production of cell feed at scale.
We collaborate with production partner Esco Aster in Singapore.
We’re working with multiple large retailers globally to optimise the introduction to consumers.
And we work with chefs and restaurant holders across the world that can’t wait to add cultivated beef to their menus.
The challenges the cellular agriculture industry faces to reshape the global food system can only be overcome by working together, and we are happy to see the engagement and enthusiasm from many parties that are joining the ecosystem.
4. Reach Cost Parity
One of the most important factors in the widespread consumer acceptance of cultivated meat will be its cost. To achieve a truly global impact, cultivated beef needs to reach cost parity with conventional beef. First market introductions will be at a premium price point. However, as we scale up and work with our partners across the value chain to bring down costs, the price of our final product will come down.
By building a robust supply chain, removing expensive animal components, sourcing cell feed ingredients at food-grade quality instead of pharma-grade quality and building scalable processes, we have already brought down the costs of our process significantly in the past years and we have a clear path towards price parity through concrete optimisations across all levers. We will share some exciting progress on this topic in the near future and are committed to continuing this progress towards cost parity - which brings us to our final point of this whitepaper.
5. Invest in Success of the Entire Field
Realising the biggest positive impact with cultivated meat will depend on both the performance of individual companies, along with the performance of the cultivated meat sector as a whole. As pioneers of the field, we have been actively investing in stimulating the wider field in many different ways.
For example, by publishing scientific papers ranging from highly specific topics like cell feed ingredients to enable the important differentiation process, to more general frameworks about the challenges our field faces as a whole.
We have also co-founded and led several industry organisations on a national level, a European level, and recently at a global level. In The Netherlands for example this has led to the Dutch government granting €60 million to support the formation of an ecosystem around cellular agriculture and investments in education, public research and open access scale-up facilities.
The success of the entire field also includes the opportunity to make improvements to plant-based products. We’ve established internally that even small amounts of high quality cultivated ingredients can have dramatic positive effects on the culinary performance of plant-based foods. We see it as an option to break the technology ceiling that is currently part of the reason growth in plant-based meat alternatives is stalling. Producing cultivated fat or muscle to improve the performance of plant-based meat alternatives is perfectly aligned with our mission at Mosa Meat and we are excited about the prospects for this possible application.
Calling upon Financial, Societal, Governmental and Scientific Institutions
The Mosa Approach is optimised towards a planet-sized ambition. We have made fundamental choices about using the right cells, maturing our beef to the highest quality, and doing so without changing the cells – all to serve the best beef possible to consumers worldwide. To realise the biggest impact:
We are starting with a focus on producing beef
We have removed animal components from our cell feed
We are partnering across the value chain
We are progressing towards cost parity, and
We are investing into the success of the entire field.
The next step for us as a company is to develop commercial-sized production facilities, that maximise the potential of our impact. In parallel we are in touch with regulators across the globe about introducing our cultivated beef to consumers. As we have described some of the complexities of our new sector, it’s clear that cultivated meat will need steady scientific progress and scaled-up value chains to reach its full potential and serve a significant part of the world’s demand for animal protein. To do this, many stakeholders will need to pull in the same direction for our shared success.
Therefore, we call upon a range of financial, societal, governmental and scientific institutions to collaborate and further invest into the development of cellular agriculture. We fundamentally believe reshaping the global food system will require a collaborative effort across many disciplines, and we are excited about the prospect of working together with a wide range of partners and growing together. We have a strong set of partners in place with strategic and mission-aligned investors, scientific and technical partners, as well as market development partners. In 2023 we will actively expand our network as we approach commercialisation.
If you are interested in exploring the opportunities together, please contact us via our partnerships form here.