Today we are proud to announce a grant awarded from React EU to lower the costs of cultivating beef and further improve the sustainability of the cellular agriculture value chain, in collaboration with our investor and partner Nutreco. The grant was awarded for research into lowering the costs of cell culture media, the most expensive step in the process of cultivating beef.

Nutreco is a Dutch-based animal nutrition and aquafeed company and one of our lead investors. Our collaborative project “Feed for Meat” was awarded the grant to address one of the the leading challenges in cultured meat development; affordability. The grant will fund focused research and development on lower-cost and sustainable nutrients for the “basal’’ or base media in which the beef cells grow.

By moving away from pharma-grade products and instead using feed- and food-grade (by)products from Nutreco’s supply chain, we predict that we can lower costs of basal media by a factor of at least 100x.

In 2019, Mosa Meat replaced Fetal Bovine Serum in our cell culture media. In addition to further optimizing the media across various teams, today we are pleased to share that we have already lowered costs of one of the major nutrients in our basal media by almost 98%.

Peter Verstrate, our co-founder and COO said today, “We are honoured to receive this grant from the EU and look forward to catalyzing our research to reduce the costs of cell culture media. Support from the government is a great contribution to bringing cultivated beef to the European market.”

Mosa Meat and Nutreco also set ambitious sustainability targets before receiving the grant. By using byproducts from the food and feed industry, and selecting the ingredients with the lowest environmental footprint, we are aiming for the highest yields in cell growth with the lowest environmental impact.

The award is yet another indicator that cellular agriculture has a critical role to play in helping the European Union meet the robust goals of the Farm to Fork strategy within the Green Deal.

According to an independent Life Cycle Analysis study, cultivated beef production is projected to reduce climate impact by 92%, air pollution by 93%, use 95% less land and 78% less water when compared to industrial beef production. Cultivated meat is also projected to comprise 35% of the global meat market by 2040. The React EU award is an important recognition of our work to advance cellular agriculture and bring cultivated beef to the EU market and we are honored to share the news with you today.

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