Artificial meat could reach restaurants in 3 years

A Dutch company that introduced the first burger with laboratory-developed meat five years ago announced that it had received funds to continue to create and sell artificial meat to restaurants from 2021 onwards.

Mosa Meat says that raised 7.5 million euros ($ 8.8 million), mainly from M Ventures and Bell Food Group. M Ventures is an investment subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA. Bell Food is a meat processing company based in Switzerland .

One of the smaller investors is Glass Wall Syndicate, which supports several companies that investigate artificial meats or by-products aimed at environmentally conscious consumers, the proper treatment of animals and conditions in slaughterhouses.

Mosa Meat based in Maastricht (The Netherlands) and who also received a million euros from Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that she was planning to sell her first products – probably ground beef for hamburgers – in 2021 . The goal is to achieve industrial production about 2 or 3 years later, and that a hamburger meat wheel costs about a dollar.

Environmentalists have warned that the growing appetite for meat in the world especially in emerging countries like China is not sustainable because beef, pork and Chicken require much more resources than plant-based proteins . Cows in particular also produce large amounts of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The great challenge is to make artificial meat look like, to smell and taste like real meat . Mosa Meat uses a small sample of cells taken from a live animal and reproduces them to create large amounts of artificial flesh.