Artificial hamburgers to hit restaurants by 2021

A Dutch company that has created a lab-produced hamburger, Mosa Meat, has received £6.7m to bring its creation to restaurants from 2021.

The majority of the company’s investment fund was from German company M Ventures and Bell Food Group. Mosa Meat said the German company were frontrunners in the production of high-quality and “scalable cell media”, calling it “significant” that the media currently comprises 80% of the cost of cultured meat.

Other investors included Google co-founder Sergey Brin who invested £890,000.

The company aims to achieve mass production two to three years after their products first hit restaurants, with a hamburger costing about one dollar. Mosa Meat creates the burgers using a cell sample from which it says it can make 80,000 hamburgers.

A Mosa Meat statement said: “The funding helps us create an end-to-end production process for cultured meat at significantly reduced cost. It will also prepare us to build a pilot production facility (we tend to call it the ‘meat brewery’) for a small-scale market introduction of premium meat in 2021.

“As the first European cultured meat company to get funded, we’re very proud but also humbled. Because the challenge before us is enormous: to keep up with growing demand for meat globally, while reducing the amount of livestock needed. Many changes are needed across several industries.

“But the vision of a more sustainable, animal-friendly way to satisfy the world’s demand for meat is one we are enthusiastically dedicated to. We’re ‘all systems go’, and we can’t wait to start the next phase of our mission to bring cultured meat to your table.”

So-called ‘clean meat’ has been the subject of controversy with the farming sector suggesting ‘artificial meat’ would be a more appropriate name.