The World’s First Cell-Cultured Burger

Mobilizing funding for Mark Post’s historic proof of concept for cultured meat

2004 - 2013

Overview

Back in the early 2000s, cultured meat was considered science fiction. As the world's only cultured meat organization at the time, our work boiled down to: How do we get the world to take cultured meat seriously as an idea worth pursuing?

Between 2004 and 2013, Harvest was involved in a series of initiatives that ultimately culminated in a historic tasting of the world’s first cell-cultured burger, developed by Mark Post at the University of Maastricht. This burger, cooked and tasted on live television, proved to the world that cultured meat is scientifically possible.

Behind-the-scenes

: Nametag from the London tasting of the world’s first cell-cultured burger. (Photo by Andrew Stout)

: Ten-layer tissue culture flasks from Mark Post’s lab used for making just a portion of the cell-cultured hamburger. The entire patty took many more culture flasks than what is shown here. (Photo by Daan Luining)

Updates

November, 2015 – New Harvest publishes a blog post about the research leading up to the 2013 burger.

Winter, 2015 – New Harvest grants Mark Post’s lab $50,000 for serum-free media research to develop a completely animal-free system for growing cultured meat.

August, 2013 – The world’s first cell-cultured burger is cooked and tasted live on BBC, proving to the world that cultured meat is scientifically possible. The burger is developed by Mark Post and funded by Sergey Brin.

2010 – Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s family foundation reaches out to New Harvest asking which labs to support in order to advance cultured meat. We direct the foundation to Mark Post.

2007 – New Harvest grants $7,000 to Henk Haagsman, the principal grant writer for the Dutch In Vitro Meat Project. Included among the other team members in the project is Mark Post, who eventually develops the 2013 burger.

October, 2004 – New Harvest founder Jason Matheny speaks with the Dutch Minister of Agriculture about cultured meat. This conversation plays a key role in inspiring the Dutch government to fund the Dutch In Vitro Meat project from May 2005 until April 2009.

See More Initiatives

2022 - Present

CMSI Phase II: International Regulatory and Government Perspectives

The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI) is a joint initiative between New Harvest and Vireo Advisors aiming to address critical technical, methodological, and informational challenges related to evaluating the safety of cultured meat (CM) products.

CMSI involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and others. Gaining such varied perspectives advances public knowledge and the practice of food safety for CM products by identifying and addressing data gaps. Research conducted to develop data and methods build the necessary support elements for the emerging ecosystem, which can raise regulatory and consumer confidence, support industry efforts toward commercialization, and improve the efficacy of evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.

Building on progress from Phase I of the Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), New Harvest and Vireo Advisors convened governmental scientists and regulators from 15 jurisdictions around the world to identify governmental priorities for the safety methods, data, and research needed to support safety evaluation of cultured meat products to reach commercial markets worldwide.

2020 - PRESENT

The New Harvest OpenCellAg Repository

In order to see our vision of a more just, equitable, and humane food system one of our key strategies is to default to open. By creating an open cellular agriculture repository on Zenodo we ensure that the research produced by New Harvest and other researchers is accessible for all to use, read, share, and build upon. In that way we are increasing the impact of this crucial knowledge by furthering its reach.

2020 - Present

CMSI Phase I: Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat

The Cultured Meat Safety Initiative (CMSI), a joint initiative between New Harvest and Vireo Advisors aiming to address critical technical, methodological, and informational challenges related to evaluating the safety of cultured meat (CM).

This involves the convening of diverse stakeholders, including industry, governmental scientists, regulators, academic researchers, and consumers. Gaining such varied perspectives advances public knowledge and the practice of food safety for CM products by identifying and addressing data gaps. Research conducted to develop data and methods build the necessary support elements for the emerging ecosystem, which can raise regulatory and consumer confidence, support industry efforts toward commercialization, and improve the evaluation processes of regulatory safety reviews.

Because growing meat through cell culture is so novel a process, many questions about the safety of cell-cultured meat and seafood products remain unanswered.

This industry-wide initiative was designed in partnership with Vireo Advisors to begin a data-driven conversation about the safety of cultured meat.

Fifty cultured meat companies shared previously unpublished details about their manufacturing processes which we used to create a body of publicly available information about how cultured meat is produced and what safety hazards might be introduced along the way.