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The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
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'. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 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.'
Mint
12-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
Food-tech is here to feed the world without devouring it
Picture this: 295 million people face severe hunger right now. Meanwhile, traditional farming consumes 70% of global freshwater, emits 11 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually and is responsible for 90% of deforestation worldwide. Every year, we lose about 12 million hectares, roughly the size of Greece, to drought and erosion. With an expected 10 billion mouths to feed by 2050, the current food supply trajectory simply isn't sustainable. But there is hope. Also Read: Jagdambika Pal: Minimize food loss and waste for the sake of our planet and its people Technology breakthroughs in food production are now a science fiction writer's envy. Remember 2013's $330,000 lab-grown burger? Today, cultivated meat pioneers like Upside Foods have slashed costs to about $20 (under lab conditions), a staggering reduction. Singapore became the first country to approve cultivated chicken commercially in 2020, followed by the US in 2023. Yet, production remains minuscule. Eat Just's pilot facility currently produces only about 3kg of lab-grown chicken per week, compared to 4,000-5,000kg at a regular shop. Although meaningful scale is years away, cultivated meat's environmental potential is compelling: studies on beef show it could cut emissions and land use by up to 90% and reduce water use by around 80% compared to conventional beef (in a best-case scenario, assuming the use of renewable energy). Also Read: Food security: Let clean-tech innovation lead the way While lab-grown meat captivates imaginations, plant-based alternatives have already reshaped supermarket shelves. The global plant-based meat market, led by brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, reached $16 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $100 billion by 2033. These alternatives currently cost around 77% more than animal meat. Yet, the environmental benefits are undeniable. For example, pea protein emits just 0.4kg of carbon dioxide per 100g protein compared to beef's staggering 35kg. Israel's Redefine Meat pushes the envelope, using advanced 3D printing to create plant-based steaks realistic enough to impress Michelin-starred chefs across Europe. India's Blue Tribe Foods creates carbon-neutral, plant-based meats, highlighting the global nature of this wave. But why only mimic meat when we can completely rethink protein production? Enter precision fermentation. Companies like Perfect Day craft dairy proteins without cows, using genetically engineered micro-organisms, slashing water use by 99% and greenhouse gas emissions by 97%. Nature's Fynd has gone further, creating nutritious proteins from microbes; its products are now stocked across hundreds of stores. And molecular farming transforms plants themselves into factories, producing everything from life-saving vaccines to spider silk proteins inside spinach leaves. Also Read: Gene editing: Is humanity ready to rewrite the book of life? NASA-inspired technology is also revolutionizing protein production. Here, Solar Foods' Solein wins for sheer audacity. It makes protein 'from thin air" using carbon dioxide, water and renewable electricity. Its first commercial facility, which opened in April 2024, expects to produce protein with far greater efficiency than traditional farms. Air Protein uses bacteria first developed for astronauts to produce protein potentially 10,000 times more efficiently per land area than soyabeans. Similarly, spirulina algae—another NASA astronaut staple—produces protein at 50 times the rate of soyabeans, actively absorbing carbon dioxide in the process. Finally, biofortification is engineering crops to tackle global nutritional deficiencies directly. Golden Rice, engineered with beta-carotene to prevent blindness, has finally reached farmers after decades-long development. In Rwanda, iron-rich beans have increased dietary iron intake by 11% within two years. Zinc-enhanced wheat now spans 1.8 million hectares in India, addressing a 'hidden hunger' that silently affects billions worldwide. Food-tech innovations hint at greater possibilities. For instance, Japan's plans for space-based solar power could potentially revolutionize agriculture by enabling farming in deserts, underground chambers or even Mars. Also Read: Food and fertilizer subsidies should be climate-adapted and aimed better Investment trends tell their own story. After a sharp decline following a peak of $51.7 billion in 2021, food-tech funding rebounded in the first half of 2024. If scaled effectively, these innovations could slash agricultural emissions by about 80%, potentially freeing land twice the combined area of China and India. Our food system is undergoing an extraordinary transformation—proteins from thin air, 3D-printed steaks, astronaut-tested algae and nutrient-rich biofortified crops. While these ideas might seem 'moonshotish' today, remember that smartphones were pure science fiction not long ago. The technology exists, the environmental benefits are clear, and the path forward is illuminated by science and imagination. We humans are ready to 'cook up' a food system that nourishes the world and proves Thomas Malthus's dismal outlook wrong again—without devouring the planet in the process. The author is a technology advisor and podcast host.
Business Times
08-05-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Cash-strapped Beyond Meat gets US$100 million from diet non-profit
[NEW YORK] Beyond Meat raised US$100 million in debt financing from a plant-based diets advocate, as the company continues to search for funds to shore up its liquidity. The lender, Unprocessed Foods, is an affiliate of Ahimsa Foundation, an organisation 'focused on advocating for plant-based diets,' the plant-based meat supplier said on Wednesday (May 7) when it reported earnings that missed analysts' estimates. The same foundation also provided US$16 million capital to help out the maker of plant-based eggs Eat Just nearly two years ago. 'The overall macro environment is challenging for alt-protein, but we are confident of the leadership and the outlook,' said Shaleen Shah, president at Ahimsa Foundation in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. 'This is the right side of the history. The way animals are grown and processed is unsustainable and alt-protein is the way forward.' Ahimsa has made numerous investments across the vegan food spectrum, he added. Beyond Meat had been in discussions with private credit lenders to raise as much as US$250 million, Bloomberg reported in February, after a previous attempt last year was unsuccessful. The El Segundo, California-based producer of meat substitutes faces the maturity of a US$1.15 billion of convertible bonds in 2027. The company, which has about US$116 million of cash and cash equivalents as at the end of March, will continue to 'evaluate potential transactions' to address the debt, it said on Wednesday. The senior secured delayed draw term loan has an initial interest of 12 per cent in so-called 'payable in kind' form, which allows the company to preserve cash as it doesn't have to pay interest periodically but instead it accumulates to be repaid when the principal is due. The maturity could be extended until 2035, but amounts drawn after 2030 would pay 17.5 per cent interest, chief financial officer Lubi Kutua said in the call with analysts. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Beyond Meat also offered the lender rights to purchase up to 12.5 per cent of its shares, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The exercise price will range between US$2 to US$3.75. Its shares fell 5.1 per cent at 6.14 pm in extended trading in New York. The stock has declined 32 per cent so far this year to Wednesday's close. Consumer caution The loan from Ahimsa comes as the company reported an increasingly dimmed revenue outlook. First-quarter revenue of US$68.7 million fell short of the average analyst estimate, with US retail volume declining 23 per cent from a year earlier. The company attributed this to 'weak category demand'. The plant-based meat supplier withdrew its full-year outlook, citing 'elevated levels of uncertainty within its operating environment.' It now projects second-quarter revenue in a range of US$80 million to US$85 million. Consumer caution is eating into grocery spending as consumers pull away from expensive meat alternatives. Food inflation is at the highest level on record, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is at its third-lowest reading ever at 52.2. Beyond Meat's products remain more expensive than the animal proteins they are competing with. BLOOMBERG
Bloomberg
07-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Cash-Strapped Beyond Meat Gets $100 Million From Diet Non-Profit
Beyond Meat Inc. raised $100 million in debt financing from a plant-based diets advocate, as the company continues to search for funds to shore up its liquidity. The lender, Unprocessed Foods, is an affiliate of Ahimsa Foundation, an organization 'focused on advocating for plant-based diets,' the plant-based meat supplier said on Wednesday when it reported earnings that missed analysts' estimates. The same foundation also provided $16 million capital to help out the maker of plant-based eggs Eat Just Inc. nearly two years ago.
CBS News
15-03-2025
- Health
- CBS News
East Bay vegan egg company Eat Just sees massive spike in demand for product
With the bird flu impacting egg production nationwide, a Bay Area-based vegan egg company said the demand for their product is rising as consumers are looking for egg alternatives. " Just Egg is growing five times faster today -- relative today -- to the same period a year ago. It's also growing five times faster than chicken eggs," Eat Just co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick told CBS News Bay Area. Tetrick's journey all started when he was trying to find the perfect protein sequences to create a texture similar to scrambled eggs. "The experiments we ran were in my buddy's studio apartment in Los Angeles; tiny little studio apartment. And I would bring on all these beans and grains and mill them in a blender," he said. Three years later, he launched the vegan alternative to eggs -- which he called "Just Egg" -- while continuing to test more recipes out of Emeryville. "In this machine over here, spins it really fast, fiber, fat, starch comes out and we're left with whole mung bean protein. It's non-GMO," Tetrick said. "Mung beans are cultivated over 4,000 years. It turns out there's a little protein inside these beans that scrambles like an egg. So we take it, mill it into a flour, and we spin it and protein comes off. This is the protein that makes the egg." According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average price for a dozen of eggs was $5.90 in February. It was a nearly dollar jump from the average price of $4.95 in January. According to the USDA, in California, the average price of a dozen of eggs in March was $10.35. "For the consumer who is worried about egg prices and egg demand and the flu, they have a product entirely made from plants they can make in their own kitchen. And most importantly, it just taste like eggs," Tetrick said. The bird flu and the cost of eggs has also not impacted one restaurant in San Francisco. Carlos Suarez, the sous chef with Rad Radish, a vegan restaurant, said they serve Just Egg in their chilaquiles and sandwiches. "It's been very popular, like these three weeks, because the problem with the eggs. We don't have any eggs in San Francisco," Suarez told CBS News Bay Area. They said the egg shortage has actually made them busier than ever. "It's not increasing the price. It's not being affected by the recently increasing prices with the regular eggs," Suarez said. "So this is a good option to come and try it." Tetrick also adds that the bird flu has opened up a greater conversation about environmental sustainability, as they sold more than half a billion eggs since they launched in 2012. "94% of Americans are eating chicken eggs. But when you double click into that, the system is a bit off. The way we treat animals, the damage it does to the environment," he said. "The overall mission is to make it so that the food that we eat is much better for our own bodies, much better for animals and much better for the planet."
