Price of Lab-Grown Meat to Plummet From $280,000 to $10 Per Patty By 2021

The price of producing a burger patty made from lab-grown meat is expected to drop to $10 by 2021, according to Dutch food technology company Mosa Meat and Spain-based Biotech Foods. Mosa Meats co-founder Mark Post created the first lab-grown beef burger (using a small amount of animal cells grown in a lab setting) in 2013 at a cost of €250,000 ($280,400)—funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—but Mosa Meat and Biotech Foods say production costs have fallen dramatically since then. The average cost of producing a kilogram of lab-grown meat (also known as cultured meat) is now about €100 ($112) which is significantly lower than the $800 cited a year ago by Israeli biotech company Future Meat Technologies. “The burger was this expensive in 2013 because back then it was novel science and we were producing at a very small scale,” a Mosa Meat spokeswoman told media outlet Reuters. “Once production is scaled up, we project the cost of producing a hamburger will be around €9 ($10).” And they could ultimately become even cheaper than a conventional burger, the spokesperson said. A number of companies have invested in research and development of lab-grown meat in recent years. Biotech Foods hopes to reach production scale of its meat and have regulatory approval by 2021, when it expects to begin generating revenue. Earlier this year, animal agriculture feed supplier Cargill announced its investment in lab-grown meat company Aleph Foods to help the startup brings its slaughter-free steak to market.