Back in 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post became the first person in the world to make a beef burger from cow cells. His company, Mosa Meats, recently raised $8.8 million from German pharmaceutical giant Merck and European meat processing company Bell Foods. Other notable investors include Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Like the other startups in the cultured meat (also called "clean" or "craft" meat) space, Mosa Meat's biggest challenges are scaling up production and lowering costs. At the time that he produced it, Post's burger cost a whopping $330,000. But the scientist and startup CEO now says he hopes to bring costs down to about $10 per burger.
An additional hurdle for cultured meat is the reliance on something called fetal bovine serum, or blood taken from the fetuses of cows that are pregnant at slaughter. That rich liquid is currently the easiest way to feed the animal cells used to make cultured meat, but if "clean" burgers ever go mainstream, they'll have to get past it.
On its website, Mosa Meats says it has managed to find an alternative food source "that works, but we still need to optimize it."