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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Vow

Vow Gets Greenlight in Australia As It Hits 1,200 Pounds Per Week of Cultivated Quail Meat

Vow, the Australian-based startup making foie gras and parfait from the cultivated cells of Japanese quail, announced a couple of big milestones this week, including what it claims to be the biggest ever production run of cultivated meat after harvesting 1,200 pounds of Japanese quail in a single week. This milestone was achieved using the company’s custom-designed 20,000-liter vessel designed entirely in-house.

This news comes the same week the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) officially approved Vow’s application to add cultivated quail to the Food Standards Code. The final step is a 60-day review period by ministers from each jurisdiction within Australia and New Zealand. If no objections are raised, Vow could begin selling its cultivated quail products across ANZ as early as June.

According to CEO George Peppou, the secret to Vow’s rapid progress isn’t just about bigger tanks—it’s about rebuilding the entire factory model from scratch.

“Pharma infrastructure just doesn’t work for food,” Peppou told me in a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast. “We designed our second factory using a completely vertically integrated approach—engineers, welders, software, everything in-house—and built it for a fraction of what others have spent.”

Vow believes its new plant can make cultivated meat at a cost that is 20-50 times cheaper than its competitors, and now Peppou says that the company is now being approached by others as a potential manufacturing partner who see their approach as one that could scale.

“We’ve seen this sort of interesting uptick recently of other companies approaching us to ask about contract manufacturing. We’ve got the capacity. We’re selling continuously and we do have some excess capacity that we can provide to other companies. So we’ve got a few projects underway at the moment, which has been a very interesting insight into how other philosophies have played out.”

You can listen to my full conversation below.

A New Approach to Cultivated Meat with Vow's George Peppou

Magic Valley Wants to Bring Cultivated Lamb to Market in a Couple Years

Australian cultivated meat company Magic Valley this week proclaimed itself “the world’s first cultured lamb company” and provided some details on what it’s been up to since its recent launch. The company is currently in prototype stage and in the process of raising seed funding.

As a meat choice, lamb stands out in a world where the majority of cultivated meat companies are busy making beef, chicken, and pork analogues. In the U.S., lamb consumption has been on the decline since the 1960s, though consumption worldwide is actually expected to rise slightly. Growth is predicted to be the highest in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Lamb production is similar to other forms of livestock production in terms of the land and water resources required to supply demand. Cultivated lamb, created by taking cells from a lamb and growing them in a nutrient-rich medium, addresses the problem of resources when it comes to developing a more sustainable end product. Magic Valley says it uses pluripotent stem cells, otherwise known as “master cells” that can create endless copies of themselves. The company does not use Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), the expensive and highly controversial growth medium many cultivated meat companies are moving away from at this point. 

To start, the Melbourne-based company said that its focus for now is on developing cultivated lamb products, including mince, strips, steaks, and, and chops. 

Lamb is typically more expensive to buy than chicken or beef, so one major challenge for Magic Valley (and any other company hoping to develop a cultivated version) will be reaching price parity with that traditional lamb meat. There is also the ever-present question of what happens to the livelihoods of livestock producers if and when cultivated meat scales enough to feed global consumers en masse. Some have argued that traditional meat producers are actually a critical part of the evolution of cultivated meat, and that these groups could invest in bioreactors to grow meat right on the farm, becoming hybrid farmers of traditional and cultivated meat.

Answers to some of those questions are yet a long ways off. Nearer term, most cultivated meat companies are just trying to get to market in some capacity. Magic Valley has no direct competitors right now, since it’s the only known company currently developing cultivated lamb. However, another Australian company, Vow, specializes in “exotic” cultured meats and is currently amassing a cell library that includes everything from water buffalo to kangaroo. Lamb may very well end up in that cell library one of these days. 

Magic Valley, meanwhile, hopes to complete its prototype and have products on shelves within one to two years.

Australian Company Vow Is Taste Testing Cell-based Kangaroo and Other Cultured Meats

Cell-based meat may be some time away from the grocery aisle, but that hasn’t stopped companies all over the world from trying to raise animal protein without the actual animal. Think cell-based beef, pork, and seafood, and, now, kangaroo and alpaca. 

The latter two on that list come courtesy of a Sydney, Austraila-based company called Vow, which today announced a recent “culinary demonstration” of its “multi-species meat platform.” Working with Australian chefs Neil Perry Corey Costelloe, Vow in August held a recent event showing off six of its cell-based meat types: goat, pork kangaroo, rabbit, lamb, and alpaca. All dishes came from Vow’s cell library (more on that below).

On its website, Vow says it takes just six weeks to get from animal cell to plated product. The company first takes and nourishes the animal cells, which grow in cultivators and form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if growing inside the animal.  

There are a couple things that set Vow apart from other companies working in the cell-based meat space. First is the sheer selection of meat Vow aims to eventually offer the buying public. Kangaroo and alpaca are unconventional enough when it comes to cultured meat, but Vow has also name-dropped zebra, yak, and other animals in the past. 

This isn’t just a gimmick to grow weird meat for the “wow” factor. Speaking recently to Food Navigator, Vow’s co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Tim Noakesmith pointed to the “uncanny valley” problem meat alternatives can encounter: that giving people a product they are used to but with a slight variation (e.g., texture, aftertaste) will garner a negative reaction.

“If we offer them something new, a new meat via a new format and give them a completely different experience, there won’t be this prior comparison [or the instinct to reject the new experience],” he told Food Navigator.

True to that idea, Vow keeps a “cell library” of different cells its scoured from all corners of the earth, which is the other factor setting it apart from others in the cultured meat space. The company says there are “hundreds upon hundreds of possible combinations” for future meat.

Vow co-founder and CEO George Peppou said in today’s press release that the recent taste testing event represented a milestone that “demonstrates we can grow the cells of any animal, not just those we can farm.”

Thus far, Integriculture’s cell-based foie gras and BlueNalu’s crustaceans are about as exotic as it’s gotten for cultured meat. So Vow’s recent unveiling of its new dishes is definitely a milestone for the cell-baed meat sector, which has raised around $290 million so far in 2020.

Vow says it is currently hiring chefs, food scientists, and sensory experts to help develop new products. For now, the company is focused on markets in the Asia-Pacific region.