Bringing In Vitro Meat to the Market

Mark Post, Dutch professor and researcher responsible for the first in vitro meat burger, is partnering up with  food expert Peter Verstraate to start a company called Mosa Meat. Their bet is to bring lab-grown meat on the market shelves within five years at a reasonable price. Sounds impossible?

Post presented his first hamburger grown in a lab two and a half years ago in London. The product was well received and the flavor was nice, but there was a problem: the price."We are investigating how we can scale up the production process, so it will be cheaper" Post said.

The price of the burger when it will hit the market shelves will most likely be between 10 to 20 euro per kilo. "Too expensive course for hamburger meat" said Peter Verstraate. "The cells of the power supply makes it especially expensive. But you'll see in later years that the power is cheaper, simply because there is much more to be produced". 

They are now looking for investors and researching the best way to place this product on the market. Their plan is also to improve the meat itself by making it taste better and by adding fat tissue. The final result will have to be as close as possible to regular meat, and only then the production will start. "If it were up to me, I would just call it meat, but it may be that we should give it another name, because we must make a distinction with the meat that, for example, comes from a cow" Post declared.

The Dutch professor believes that meat consumption could become sustainable for the environment thanks to lab-grown meat. "We gain greater control over what the meat consists of, for example its fat content,” Post told to The Atlantic. “And the reduction in the number of farmed animals reduces the chance of zoonosis [infectious diseases spread by animals]”.

To have an idea of the food culture lab-grown meat could bring us in the future you can have a look at the In Vitro Cookbook, where we presents speculative lab-grown meat products that might be on your plate one day.

Source: Nos. Image: Shutterstock