Mark Post is a man on a mission. The environmental damage from livestock production is far too great and must be drastically reduced. His contribution: cultured meat. He is now not only a scientist, but also the director of Mosa Meat, a company that is worth 75 million euros. And no, he is not a vegetarian.

At the entrance to Mosa Meat in an industrial area in Maastricht, employees are having lunch together. They are mostly young academics with a master's or PHD. As many as 65 are employed, the other 35 positions go to development, purchasing, HR. 'It's like a full company,' jokes chief scientific officer Post who founded the company in 2015 with food technologist Peter Verstrate. Earlier, on December 5, 2013, they presented the first hamburger from cultured meat in London: a 250,000 euro snack.

In the meantime, Mosa Meat is not only large but also international, with no fewer than 23 nationalities represented. We have no trouble finding people. For someone from Madrid it doesn't matter whether you are in Maastricht, Eindhoven or Amsterdam. For me it's convenient that it's in Maastricht, because I like to cycle from home to work and I don't feel like moving. It all started here at the university and Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus; that presence becomes less important as the company grows and you develop your own capacity to research certain things. For example, we now have our own laboratory. This company could exist anywhere but we would like to keep it here at Brightlands.'

You would think that the urgency to make cultured meat has increased since the European Commission launched the so-called Green Deal. 'This is a world problem, not a European one,' rebuts Post. The future consumption of meat will not take place in Europe but in India and China. I have been feeling this urgency since 2008.

In September it became clear that actor Leonardo di Caprio had also signed up as an investor. Post made the big blow when he was able to bring in Google founder Sergey Brin as an investor during a breakfast at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Maastricht. Mosa Meat is now the most profitable company at Brightlands: 75 million.

It is mainly private investors who step in, about 25 in total. According to Post it helps that there is social value at stake. For radical ideas like these, public investment always lags behind because people don't dare take the risk.' Incidentally, small investors still need at least 500,000 euros. Mark Post is not counting on a great deal more public money; he mainly hopes that governments will invest in public awareness of CO2 emissions and the possibilities for reducing them.

About the support in society he says he has no complaints. Of course, they do research on it at Mosa Meat. 'I think people all over the world understand that we have a problem. We can help the earth to the brink by continuing to eat meat or look for an alternative so that we don't all have to become vegetarians. About half of the people think cultured meat is a good idea and that percentage is increasing. That's encouraging."

Mark Post, also a professor of vascular physiology, calls himself a man with a mission. And that mission is to reduce the environmental impact of livestock farming worldwide. The resistance is not so bad. Of course there are always meat producers, farmers and people from the industry who are wedded to their hamburgers, but on the other hand there are also meat producers who invest in our idea.

The question is: can't it all be done a little faster? 'We can influence that but it is difficult. The technology we apply comes originally from the medical world. All the ingredients are terribly expensive. Yet they are actually ingredients like sugar. Sugar on the table at home is not as expensive as the sugar you encounter in the pharmaceutical industry. So for us too, we have to step outside the traditional paths. For example, we are now working with cattle feed companies. They also make sugar but feed it to pigs. We are looking at whether we can get ingredients from there and investigate whether our cells like it. I am simplifying things a bit, but there is an enormous amount of profit to be made here. To give another example, we use a protein called fgf. Until recently, that cost one million euros per gram. Fortunately we use minute quantities of it, but still. The same protein or a similar one like insulin is currently made for a hundred euros a gram. So not a million. You can even make it for five euros a gram if you wanted to. So that industry especially has to change. That's what we all have to investigate, that's why there are a hundred of us here.'

Good, investors are there, the ingredients can be cheaper, Europe needs time, are there more obstacles? 'The biggest obstacle is scaling up cell culture, from small quantities to large tanks. You think very simply: you just make it bigger but it doesn't work like that. It requires a lot of research.'

Mosa Meat is considered a global leader in the field of cultured meat. But it is also working hard to develop cultured meat in Israel, the US and Singapore. I don't think we will remain the biggest in terms of quantity,' says Post. And we don't need to be. The industry is huge. I think it would be wonderful if there were a factory here that provided employment for a few thousand people or a few tens of thousands.

Not afraid that the competition will go faster? 'Of course I don't want to be overtaken left or right. I'd like to win, that's my nature. But you have to be realistic, you're not the only one doing this. In Silicone Valley you can get money three times easier than here. What plays in our favor is that we were earlier and are smarter.'

Amsterdam resident Post earned his medical degree from Utrecht University in 1982 and a PhD in pulmonary pharmacology. Through the Interuniversity Cardiology Institute Netherlands, he left for Boston where he became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He moved his lab to New Hampshire to return to the Netherlands in 2002 , more specifically to Maastricht University and Eindhoven University of Technology. Once back, he hooked into a program to produce cultured meat and expanded it as a professor of angiogenesis tissue culture together with Peter Verstrate with whom he founded Mosa Meat.

There will come a time when he will have to let go, is he already working on that? 'To me it is very natural that you hire people who are better than yourself. That's what you're supposed to do. That sounds very logical but many people have difficulty with that. They want to stay in control. I don't have that. We have seven senior scientists here and they are all better at what they do than I am. And they have to be. Together they can do this easily. Officially I will retire in three years, no one believes it but that is how it is. I can also have a heart attack tomorrow. So I have to coach people to take over my role. It's really not like I think this company will collapse if I leave.'

Post sees a good future for Mosa Meat. I am a scientist by trade so I hardly ever know anything for sure. But no, I don't see this going wrong anymore. I didn't wake up one day and think: I'm going to become an entrepreneur now. This company, and that is partly its strength, was founded as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. I realized very early on that if I wanted to make hamburgers that I couldn't do it in college. When we made the first hamburger in 2013, my employees, who are all scientists, said, nice but we're never going to do this again. Then you realize that the university is not an environment for that and it was clear that it had to be a business.'

For now, Mosa Meat is focusing on the hamburger. It won't stop there. 'I do have ideas about other products like producing a T-Bonesteak or a Rib-Eye, but first the hamburger. I think a hamburger is already quite something. There is a company in the world that wants to make a piece of meat right away. I think that's very brave. The reason we didn't is that it is very complicated, although it can be done. But then you run the risk that it will take too long before something like that comes onto the market.

Learn more about Mosa Meat

As if Post wasn't busy enough as boss of Mosa Meat and his work at the university, he founded another Brightlands company this year: Qorium. It has since received a subsidy and he is in the process of recruiting personnel. He laughs: "I do Mosa Meat five days a week, Qorium the other two days of the week. In fact it's about a similar idea and a similar technology. We are going to make leather with that. That is a very polluting industry and you need cows for it with all its consequences. We are starting with seven people but I expect that in three years we will be as big as Mosa Meat. There are far fewer places where this happens. Mosa Meat has seventy competitors in the world, Qorium three. And that's also a spin-off from the university and a Brightlands company. Oh well, we'll see how we'll arrange that if it gets that big.'

Learn more about Qorium