Dutch start-up creates hamburgers in a lab

Mark Post, a professor from Maastricht, estimates hamburgers created in a lab will be available for consumption in three years’ time. Post gained fame when he was the very first to create a lab-made hamburger.

To consumers in three years

In order to create a hamburger, he obtained a piece of muscle tissue from a cow and multiplied the cells to create a hamburger for which no cow had to die.

He founded Mosa Meat this summer, in order to start the process of getting these hamburgers into the hands of consumers within the next few years. The biggest issue is to lower costs, because that first hamburger cost an astonishing 250,000 euro to create. In three years’ time, he hopes to lower the price to 11 euro and within the next 8 years, the price should be comparable to that of a normal piece of meat in the supermarket.

10,000 kilogram of meat every year

“We are now working on our second capital round to enable to scale up our technology”, Post said. “Within the next 3 to 4 years, we will be making meat in tanks half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Those bio reactors will be able to produce 10,000 kilograms of meat every year.”

Manufactured meat could become the solution to the meat industry’s impact on our climate as it only requires a fraction of the area and water needed for livestock. On top of that, the current levels of livestock produce 15 to 20 % of all greenhouse gases. Another advantage would be that we would no longer need to butcher animals.