But just two years on, and scientists have announced a drastic cut in the cost of producing one of these patties, saying the price tag is now just a little more than $11 per burger, or $80 per kilogram of the meat. And the best part? The technique requires just a just a small piece of muscle to produce 10,000 kilos of lab meat.

"Cattle are very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We lose actually a lot of food by giving it to animals as an intermediate," one of the team, Mark Post from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, told Dominqiue Schwartz at ABC News. "At an environmental scale in methane and other greenhouse gases exhaust, it is also for the environment not a very healthy system. I do think that in 20, 30 years from now, we will have a viable industry producing alternative beef."