Netherlands-based cultivated meat company, Mosa Meat, opened its fourth-largest production facility in Maastricht on May 9. At 2,760 square meters, the scale up facility is the world’s largest cultivated meat center and completes the Mosa Center for Advanced Meat Production, Upscaling and Sustainability (C.A.M.P.U.S) totaling 7,340 square meters.
At the unveiling, Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat, said “This scale-up facility is the first of its kind, able to replace beef with beef and to produce tens of thousands of cultivated hamburgers.”
Mosa Meat announced the creation of the first cultivated meat burger in 2013, where the production of one single burger took three months and $274,000 in funding. Now the company can make a burger in less than three weeks at considerably lower costs. Three cows from a local farmer are used for bovine-cell extraction, then multiplied in the scale-up facility, with just half a gram producing 80 thousand hamburgers.
Cultivated meat will help us to meet the world’s growing protein needs in an efficient and environmentally friendly way, but cell-based foods are yet to reach European consumers. As no company has applied to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for a safety rating that permits market entry, no cultivated foods are currently marketed in Europe.