Mosa Meat of Holland has raised $43 million in a funding round led by LowerCarbon Ventures among others.
Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meats, stated, “The overall macroeconomic landscape has been rough in the last two years, that has culled the herd of companies and forced us to be even more strategic and focused on achieving our mission.”
Previously, the Company raised $55 million to expand pilot production. The current expenditure will be to scale up to commercial production. This step appears to be a major restraint to marketing cell-cultured meat since no company appears to have broken the barrier of consistently achieving commercial scale production in bioreactors.
At this stage, cell-cultured meat appears to be a giant black hole for venture capital funding with some estimates placing investment north of $2 billion since inception of the concept with little to show for the expenditure. Apart from the problem of production at a competitive cost, parliaments in France and Italy and state legislatures in the U.S. have imposed either outright bans as in Florida and Alabama or are to require onerous labeling requirements that are essentially discriminatory and to protect conventional livestock production.
As with plant-based meat substitutes, affluent consumers may be willing to sample the product but long-term growth through universal acceptance will only be achieved at a comparable cost to conventional meat and with similar organoleptic properties and flexibility in preparation of a range of meat dishes. Non-quantifiable attributes including environmental benefits will not be sufficient to justify a price differential or contribute to preferential purchase if texture or taste is inferior to protein from animals and poultry.
There appears to be more support for cell-cultured meat in the E.U. compared to the U.S. but production and economic restraints will determine the future of cell-cultured meat. Production at this time has not progressed beyond limited pilot scale. The image of the embryonic industry has not been helped by unsubstantiated hype and in some cases, deliberate deception by unethical companies desperately seeking venture capital funding to survive until the next round.