At a high level sushi bar in New York last week, a flurry of media and policy types launched a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas and mushroom salad. But what makes this menu unusual is one ingredient that runs throughout the dishes – foie gras made from quail cells incubated in a bioreactor. The event, catered by sushi chef Masa Takayama, was the launch party for Australian meat company Vow, which will sell foie gras at a number of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The meal was boring – one dish contained a mountain of black truffles – but that was the point. Vow and its CEO George Peppou are treating cultivated meat as a luxury product — an unusual positioning for an industry whose many founders are driven by animal welfare and compete directly with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in a lab remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the industry’s Achilles heel to his advantage.
“I feel like the obituary has been written for our industry,” he said. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”
It’s something that both produces meat and makes a profit. The big challenge facing the industry—with with prohibitions and shortage venture capital money—is that culturing animal cells in bioreactors costs a lot of money. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but a research article with data provided by companies in 2021, farmed meat price estimates range from $10,000 to $68 per pound, depending on production method. Many startups say they have significantly cut production costs since initial testing, but prices are still much higher than factory-farmed chicken around $2.67 per pound.
The two best-funded startups in the space—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have both launched farmed chicken products. But Peppou, who relies on his reputation in the industry as a provocateur, says that approach makes no sense. “Cutting chicken is always a terrible idea,” he said.
The basic principle of cultivated meat is that it is expensive. Growing animal cells outside their bodies is typically the province of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Animal cells grown in culture are used to produce vaccines and drugs, which are sold in small quantities at sky-high prices. The cultivated meat industry needs some of the same ingredients to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but not as pharmaceuticals. industry, it needs to grow large quantities of cells and sell them at grocery store prices.
