Future farmer: Nik Mazari, Process Development Engineer

In this series we are interviewing our future farmers at Mosa Meat about what inspires them as pioneers of cellular agriculture. Today we interviewed Nik Mazari, a Process Development Engineer on our Automation Team.

Nik, tell us a bit about your background. Where are you from and what brought you to Mosa Meat?

I was born and raised in Mainz, Germany to Iranian parents. During high school, I participated in an exchange program in Colorado Springs, the United States. After graduating high school in Germany, I read Al Gore’s book Our Choice, and I became convinced that engineering would be a key lever in combating climate change. 

Soon after, I decided to pursue my Bachelor’s in Environmental Engineering at the RWTH Aachen University, in Germany. Environmental Engineering was focused on ways to ‘clean up the system,’ for example through recycling of water or waste. I wanted to change the system itself, and help transform the industry and the consumer side of things, so I did my Master’s in Environmental Process Engineering also at the RWTH. 

Around that time, in 2015, I read an article in a big German newspaper about the world’s first cultured burger launch [led by our co founders Mark Post and Peter Verstrate] in 2013. I was immediately hooked on the idea of cultured meat.

A few years later in 2018, I was completing my master’s thesis and decided to walk into Mark’s office [then at Maastricht University] and tell him I wanted to work for him. I was so convinced of the idea, and I was also convinced that engineering had a role to play. We discussed my master’s thesis, which was focused on an alternative method to eliminate certain drugs from recycled drinking water. A couple months later I talked to Peter, our cofounder, as well as Jonathan and Vincent from the Automation and Bioprocess Teams, and soon after I was welcomed to join Mosa Meat.

What is your job day-to-day as an engineer, and how does it fit into making a cultured burger?

I’m a Process Development Engineer on the Automation Team. We find ways and processes to scale up the experiments that have shown the best results. Essentially, we want to eliminate human error as much as possible, in these technical procedures we do this through standardization and automation. Also, these processes might need completely new vessels or approaches which we develop mostly in-house.

At each step and scale you have different challenges. During proliferation (cell doubling) and differentiation (cells becoming muscle or fat tissue), we help the R&D teams to find ways for scaling up their processes.

As an example, we see that the scientists need to transfer the expanded cells into their next environment, in which they will differentiate. At an experiment-level, this step is already quite cumbersome. Therefore, the first thing we do is get the teams together to discuss the procedure in detail and think of a way to translate it into the production environment. If there is a commercial solution which we can use, we opt for that if it’s not too expensive. Otherwise, we come up with our own solutions which are usually also cheaper. In the specific case of harvesting cells, we have decided to develop the Harvesting Station, a user-friendly device that can be hooked onto our cultivators, which automatically pumps around the cells and prepares them for the next step.  

Why does the cellular agriculture industry need engineers? 

Scientific innovation usually happens first on a small scale, but you then need to scale it up. A famous example is the Haber-Bosch process, which is used to convert nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. It was invented in the early 1900’s by chemists, but chemical engineers were essential in scaling this into an industrial process, and it ended up becoming the standard in creating fertilizers.

Similarly, Mosa Meat needs to scale up our process, in our case to make thousands of burgers. Rather than looking at chemical reactions, we’re focused on creating the right environment in which beef cells can grow. Monitoring the data within these environments (temperature, levels of nutrients, oxygen, and so on in our bioreactors), is also important.

Finally, we need to eliminate human error during the whole production process, as I mentioned earlier.

If we didn’t automate these processes, making burgers at scale would be impossible. 

How do you spend your free time?

I like to do a lot of sports, for instance basketball, football, snowboarding, surfing, and scuba diving. I also love to travel and meet new people. For instance in Vietnam, I loved the food and the dignity of the people. A few of my other favourite countries are Indonesia (specifically diving in Bali), Spain (because of the culture and the weather) and the US (because of the national parks, and the nature, and the food).

How do you feel your values have changed since joining Mosa Meat, and what is it like working here?

One of my biggest values is to treat the other person as you want to be treated. This has evolved even more at Mosa Meat, because if you disagree with someone on a problem you’re trying to solve, you put your ego aside and work together to find the best solution. If their approach works better, then you go for that. 

I don’t get the ‘Sunday blues’ here...because there’s nothing more fulfilling than getting up everyday and applying everything that you’ve learned to save the planet.

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