9 hours ago
Australia's first lab-grown meat will be on menus within weeks
For over a decade, lab-grown meat has been hailed as the food of tomorrow – a plate changing technological innovation that is right around the corner. Now, in Australia, tomorrow has finally come.
After a two-year-long approval process, Food Standards Australia New Zealand has given Australian food technology startup Vow foods the green light to sell three products made from cultured quail cells.
Vow's 'forged' whipped pate, foie gras and an edible tallow candle, all made from cultured Japanese quail cells, will soon be on the menu at high-end Australian restaurants including Bottarga in Melbourne and Nel in Sydney. The products have been available in Singapore for over a year, with Vow stating demand has grown by 200% a month.
Cultivating animal cells is an error-prone process. Vow is one of only three companies worldwide approved to sell lab-grown meat for human consumption. US-based start up Eat Just has sold lab-grown chicken on and off in Singapore since 2023 under the name Good Meat; while another US company, Upside Foods, has regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken cell products in the US, but does not currently have any in the market.
The CEO of Vow, George Peppou, is taking a very different approach from these competitors. Rather than asking customers to pay $71 a kg for frozen shredded 'chicken', he says the company is embracing the high cost of cultivating cells by creating products to match the price.
'We selected going with these very high end products, very high end positioning … as a way of trying to shape and influence food culture as much as possible,' he says. While foie gras prices fluctuate significantly, at the time of writing Vow's Forged foie was cheaper than the real deal.
A few weeks before Vow's offerings gain approval, I visit the company's Sydney factory to taste them. Unlike other Guardian Australia reporters, who have had to sign liability waivers before eating lab-grown foods, this sample session came with no paperwork.
First, Vow's product development manager Kevin Condon pipes portions of their synthetic parfait on to potato chips, which he tops with chopped chives and lemon myrtle oil.
Velvety, savoury and very rich, it tastes close enough to chicken liver parfait that I could easily be fooled. Made with 60% cultured cells, the rest is a mixture of cognac, garlic, olive oil, thyme and butter, emulsified to give it a silky texture. Condon says they wanted the flavour to be 'very familiar', while the texture is preternaturally fluffy. 'Livers have that inherent grittiness and graininess,' Condon says, so making a parfait this mousse-like the conventional way would be impossible, 'no matter how many times you sieve it'.
The foie is far less convincing. Served seared with scallop, berries and micro-greens, it is intensely savoury with a browned, meaty crust. Inside the texture is almost bouncy, like spam, without the unctuous, mouth-coating effect of foie gras. It has none of the metallic, organ funk either. When I tell the Vow team I haven't tasted anything like it, they break into smiles. Making something new, rather than an alternative, is sort of the point.
Peppou says that talking with chefs taught them foie gras' heavy, offal flavour is something 'a lot of people find really unpleasant'.
'And so instead we've toned it down'.
The tallow candle, which melts down so bread can be dipped into it, tastes remarkably like a candle. It turns out the flavour is all in the wick.
The reason for cultivating quail cells, then turning them into products with fairly homogenous textures, isn't all about perceived luxuriousness. Over the years, Vow has cultivated cells from about 50 species – including a giant meatball made of woolly mammoth – and have found that 'smaller is easier,' Peppou says. Japanese quail was one of the first cells they found to 'grow really well'.
As for the texture, Vow isn't growing whole quail breasts in petri-dishes. Cells are nourished in a vat, then harvested using a centrifuge. The end result is a homogenous, pale pink goo that is 'not much to look at,' Peppou says. To get cells from this state into viable foodstuff requires manufacturing processes that are less scientifically advanced, but no-less technically challenging, than growing them in the first place.
'We knew we could get really consistent high quality with homogenous textures much faster than we can with the more complex texture,' Peppou says.
Vow's cavernous 2,071 square metre factory is home to the world's largest food-grade bioreactor, nicknamed Andromeda.
Andromeda resembles a whiskey still designed by MC Escher. It is seven metres tall, with dozens of pipes running in and out of it. 'If you talk to people that have come from biopharmaceutical cell culture, they will tell you it's very complex, it's very difficult,' Peppou says. In reality, he finds it is 'incrementally more complex than beer brewing'.
Several Vow factory employees are former brewers, though they've also hired biomedical and aeronautical engineers, and Vow's CTO is a former SpaceX employee. This disparate group has managed to build what Peppou says is 'by orders of magnitude the cheapest factory for cell culture in the world'.
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Many of Australia's other lab-grown startups, like chicken fat alternatives and synthetic milks, rely on genetically modified microbes for fermentation, rather than cultivating whole cells.
Peppou says he has fielded an inquiry to 'essentially license our engineering to apply it to microbial fermentation' – a process that is much less complex – 'because we are cheaper than fermentation'.
While both cultured cells and fermentation involve a bioreactor; CSIRO scientist Crispin Howitt, who works on precision fermentation, says that the latter involves modifying microbial DNA in order to produce specific forms of protein or fat.
At the CSIRO, 'we're taking strains of yeast that we know how to grow well, and we know that we can transform … to produce essentially in most cases a single protein, and then you purify that one protein'.
In other countries, there are already synthetic dairy and egg products on the market, but none of Australia's startups are yet to get to that point. The reason, Howitt says, comes down to financing. 'If you think about the pharmaceutical industry, they've already built facilities at scale that do precision fermentation. But when you've got a high-value product, it's easier to build a business case around investing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars upfront, before you even start producing the product. When you're talking about the food industry which has lower margins, it's just a harder business case.'
Vow's ability to get to market has been helped by 'some big backers like Blackbird and Square Peg Venture and some international investors,' Peppou says. To date, the company has raised around $80m.
'We are very capital efficient … And so we've been able to turn a relatively small amount of capital into a lot of commercial progress.'
Capital efficiency has come at other costs – in January of this year, Vow laid off 20% of its workforce. At the time, Peppou told the AFR the layoffs came from a need to 'focus our entire efforts on activities that put our products into more markets and on to more consumers' plates'.
Vow has completed a single harvest of 538 kilograms – a world record for cultured meat, and say they have the capacity to harvest up to three times that amount a week. This number may sound large, but compared to the 388,000 tonnes of chicken meat Australia produced in March this year, it is minuscule.
Peppou and Howitt both say that to move from a tiny, high-end niche to mass consumption, lab-grown animal products will need not only to scale, but to become cheaper, more delicious and ideally healthier than the food people already eat.
The industry has learned a lot from the hype and subsequent commercial disappointment of other novel food products. 'It's no secret that the plant-based burgers have not gone as well as people anticipated originally,' Howitt says. 'It's because they're jumping into a very established market with very defined [consumer] expectations.'
Peppou is more blunt: 'Hey, do you want a worse burger at a higher price so the planet benefits? … Not really. If I want to eat a beef burger, I'll eat a beef burger, which tastes really good. And if I don't want to eat a beef burger, because I want to eat sustainably, I'll eat a carrot.'
This is why, in Vow's marketing, you will see very few references to the ethics of their products, and a lot of emphasis on the taste. 'To change the behaviour of people like me, that like meat, we need to offer things which are different to what I already consume,' Peppou says.
'It's not an alternative, it's not a replacement, it's something which is different and the excitement comes from that difference.'
