Dutch Startup Mosa Meat Files for UK Regulatory Approval of Cultivated Beef Fat

Dutch cultivated meat startup Mosa Meat has filed for regulatory approval in the UK, where it’s part of a government support scheme and teased its first burger all those years ago.

Twelve years after unveiling the world’s first cultivated beef burger in London, Mosa Meat has applied for regulatory approval to sell its beef fat ingredient in the UK.

The Dutch startup has filed the dossier with the Food Standards Agency, two months after joining the regulator’s cultivated meat ‘sandbox’ programme, which hosts eight firms looking to speed up the commercialisation of their products.

At the launch of the two-year scheme, the FSA indicated its goal to approve at least two products during this period. This means Mosa Meat’s cultivated beef fat, which can be blended with plant-based ingredients to make hybrid burgers, meatballs, and filling for cottage pie, could be on the market by 2027.

“We are thankful to the FSA for engaging in valuable presubmission consultations with our food safety team,” said Mosa Meat CEO Maarten Bosch. “We included their valuable feedback and have submitted our cultivated beef fat dossier for formal review.”

The UK filing comes amid a period of rapid progress for Mosa Meat, which submitted dossiers to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and Switzerland’s Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office.

And in February, it smashed its crowdfunding goal of €1.5M in just 24 minutes, a sign of public confidence in the startup at a time when VCs have become disillusioned with cultivated meat. The firm raised a total of €3.7M ($3.9M at the time) from nearly 1,650 investors, taking its overall funding to date to $139M.

Mosa Meat is preparing public tastings of cultivated beef

Mosa Meat is one of a number of startups focusing on cultivated fat as the first ingredient. Fat is the most optimal carrier of flavour and provides the textural attributes that meat is renowned for, which allows the startup to deliver a sensory experience people expect from conventional beef

“By starting with cultivated fat, we’re paving the way to introduce our first burgers to consumers while staying true to our long-term vision. Our initial products will combine cultivated and plant-based ingredients, leveraging our in-house expertise in both areas,” explained Bosch.

“This innovation not only enhances our Mosa burgers, but also has the potential to elevate plant-based products, which often struggle to replicate the full sensory experience of meat.”

There’s another advantage: by blending fat with plant-based ingredients, companies can make the final product a lot more cost-effective, which is a crucial bottleneck for the industry. That first set of burgers in 2013, introduced by co-founder Dr Mark Post, cost $330,000 to make; the firm has since dramatically lowered its production costs, reducing the price of its growth medium by 80-fold in 2020 and its fat medium by 66 times a year later.

Before the UK, the EU and Switzerland, Mosa Meat first applied for approval with the Singapore Food Agency, but the original nine- to 12-month timeline the country has touted has been hard to realise. A new Food Safety and Security Bill, which codifies the assessment framework, can break the deadlock and speed up the process in the city-state.

The startup has previously indicated interest in the US too, though the decision will now partly depend on political developments. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and Robert F Kennedy’s appointment as health secretary have left things uncertain for food tech in the country, particularly cultivated meat, which has now been banned in five states, with several others poised to join that list.

Last year, Mosa Meat held a public tasting of its burgers for cattle farmers, product developers and other industry representatives at its headquarters in Maastricht. “We are currently creating our next-generation products and are preparing to submit tasting approvals for those this year,” Bosch told Green Queen in February.

UK aims to become a cultivated meat leader

The UK’s Cell-Cultivated Products Regulatory Sandbox was set up with a £1.6M infusion by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, as part of the first round of its Engineering Biology Sandbox Fund. It came as the government sought to modernise its novel food ecosystem, having followed the EU’s framework, described as rigorous yet slow and prohibitive, in its post-Brexit years.

Sandboxes comprise controlled environments for situations where scientific and technological innovation has outpaced existing regulation. They run for a limited period to help startups, researchers and regulators work together to develop new rules, standards and guidance.

It is being jointly run by the FSA and Food Standards Scotland (FSS), which are gathering “rigorous scientific evidence” about the technology behind cell-cultured foods to better regulate these products and apply up-to-date insights during safety assessments. The FSA has previously said it expects at least 15 more applications in the next two years, and predicted the rise of many new startups in the space.

“These are exactly the kind of public-private partnerships we envisioned when we debuted the world’s first cultivated burger right here in London in 2013,” Mosa Meat’s Post said in March.

“The regulatory sandbox is already making an impact on attracting innovative companies like ours to the UK market,” Bosch said after the British dosier submission.

In the sandbox, Mosa Meat is joined by Hoxton Farms, Roslin Technologies, Uncommon Bio (all British), BlueNalu (US), Vow (Australia), Gourmey (France), and Vital Meat (France). The latter two, along with British startup Ivy Farm Technologies and Israel’s Aleph Farms, are already waiting on FSA approval. London-based Meatly is the only one to have received the green light (and sold cultivated meat) in the UK, albeit for pet food.

The FSA is working with the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub (CARMA), the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (helped by a £15M injection from the government), and Bezos Earth Fund‘s Centre for Sustainable Protein, as part of the sandbox, alongside think tank the Good Food Institute Europe and trade body the Alternative Proteins Association. Plus, it is setting up a system of international cooperation, allowing the UK to approve cultivated meat products cleared elsewhere.

When it comes to regulatory approvals, it has been a fruitful 18 months for cultivated meat startups. Aleph Farms has earned the go-ahead in Israel, Vow in Singapore and (preliminarily) Australia and New Zealand, and Mission Barns in the US. Meanwhile, Thailand is evaluating Aleph Farms’s application, while experts believe South Korea could grant an approval this year.