Pioneer-cultivated beef company Mosa Meat announces it has become the ‘first’ cultivated meat company to receive B Corp certification.
With this certification, Mosa Meat joins a community of more than 5,500 B Corp companies across 85 countries and 158 industries to transform the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet.
According to Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat, the B Corp Certification confirms the company’s dedication to sustainable practices and it reinforces its leadership in the cellular agriculture industry.
Mosa Meat is a privately held company established in the Netherlands, backed by Blue Horizon, Bell Food Group, Nutreco, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Leonardo DiCaprio. To date, the company has raised about $100 million to cultivate meat and mitigate the climate impact of industrial beef production.
Creating real meat
“We believe in creating real, delicious meat that positively impacts the climate and our food system and are optimistic that these values will be shared across the many stakeholders in our nascent field of cellular agriculture,” says Bosch.
Founded in 2016, Mosa Meat introduced the world’s first cultivated beef hamburger grown “directly” from cow cells in 2013. Through the years, the company has overcome the industry’s challenge of lowering the costs of cultivating meat. It has developed a cell feed without fetal bovine serum using food-grade ingredients in partnership with Nutreco and established a process for cell attachment without scaffolds.
Mosa Meat is scaling beef production and has announced plans to apply for regulatory approvals in Singapore and the US. Cultivated meat has not been approved in the EU, but the company can organize tastings in the Netherlands.
Environmental performance
B Corp-certified companies must meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance purpose and profits.
Mosa Meat explains that to become B Corp Certified, it had to undergo evaluations for more than one year for two impact business models: resource conservation and mission locked.
Resource conservation recognizes products or services that reduce resource use, such as energy and water. Mosa Meat’s facility uses 100% renewable energy. In addition to this favorable climate impact, according to an independent, peer-reviewed Life Cycle Analysis study, cultivated beef production could reduce climate impact by 92%, air pollution by 93%, and use 95% less land and 78% less water when compared to industrial beef.
The mission-locked business model recognizes companies prioritizing their mission and stakeholders in decision-making processes. They consider the impact of their decisions on workers, customers, suppliers, and the community.
“Mosa Meat continues to be a champion for change. I am proud to see Mosa Meat be the first cultivated meat company in the world to become B Corp Certified and hope it is the first of many,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, who is also an advisor to the company.
