Mosa Meat Turns Five!
Five years ago on this day, our cofounders Mark Post and Peter Verstrate were traveling home after presenting their business case for a new cultivated meat company.
They had almost everything in place for the venture, except for a name.
As they passed by a river, Peter suggested Maas Meat, after the river which runs through our home town in Maastricht. Mark replied, “What about Mosa Meat?”
Mosa is the Latin name for Maastricht’s iconic river, also known as Meuse—and so Mosa Meat was born.
The River Meuse derives its name from the Latin “Mosa,” which alludes to its maze-like turns.
Mark and Peter had been leading research on cultivated beef for years, and on this day in 2016, they crystallized their efforts in a company dedicated to bringing cultivated beef burgers to the world.
“In the past five years, Mosa Meat has grown in every way—our employees, our facilities, our fundraising and of course, our scientific progress,” shared Mark today.
“However, throughout these evolutions our mission has remained the same: to fundamentally reshape the global food system.”
Birthdays are a time to reflect, so we’ve rounded up some of our major achievements in the past five years, all of which bring us closer to achieving a planet-sized impact:
Closing our Series A and Series B funding
In the past five years we’ve welcomed a diverse range of mission-led investors to Mosa Meat and raised over $85 million to bring real beef to consumers that is better for the planet and animals.
Our partners range from within the traditional agriculture industry to owners of takeaway companies, to large-scale automation companies.
Reducing the cost of our medium
One of the main goals Mosa Meat has been working on is reducing the cost of our product so we can make cultivated meat at scale. Our Medium Optimization and Fat Teams have been working hard on this, and over the last few years managed to reduce the medium by 88 times and 66 times respectively.
This helps bring us closer to price parity with conventional beef.
Expanding our presence in Watermolen
After moving into our new home at Watermolen last year, we have continued to expand the space so we can bring cultivated beef to the world. The latest addition, our cultivation kitchen, will enable us to make commercial scale meat.
Reaching 100 Mosæans
There’s simply no Mosa Meat without our incredibly hard working and dedicated team. We began 2020 with 35 employees, and as of today, we signed our 100th employee contract! Each person brings a unique and individual skill to the team, but we share the same values.
Jonathan, Sergio, Anitha, Richard and Vicky (left to right), some of our oldest and newest team members, return to Watermolen after biking in and around Maastricht to celebrate our fifth birthday.
“We are aware that we are changing how meat is being grown,” shared Jonathan Breemhaar, who joined Mosa Meat as employee #2 in 2018. “Even though it’s such a fundamental and historic change, at Mosa Meat people don’t seem to have any problem envisioning and even shaping it.”
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