At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a small group of media and policy makers devoured a menu that included sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the only ingredient used in the dish: foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, hosted by sushi chef Masa Takayama, was the launch party for Vow, an Australian cultured meat company that sells foie gras in a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The meal was decadent, one course included a mountain of black truffles, but that was pretty much the point. Vow and CEO George Peppou are treating cultured meat as a luxury item, an unusual position in an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and are competing head-on with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles heel to his advantage.
“I feel like the obituary has already been written for this industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean they can’t do something.”
That means producing cultured meat while making a profit. Along with bans and a lack of venture capital funding, a major challenge facing the industry is the high cost of growing animal cells in bioreactors. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but one research paper with company-provided data from 2021 estimates that cultured meat costs between $68 and $10,000 per pound, depending on production method. That’s what it means. Although many startups say they have significantly reduced production costs since early experiments, the price is much higher than factory-farmed chicken, at about $2.67 per pound.
Two of the most funded startups in the space, Eat Just and Upside Foods, are both bringing grown chicken products to market. But Peppou, who sees his reputation in the industry as one of a provocateur, says that approach makes no sense. “Making chicken was always a terrible idea,” he says.
Cultured meat is generally expensive. The business of growing animal cells outside the body is typically the domain of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Animal cells grown in culture are used to manufacture vaccines and medicines, and are sold in small quantities at high prices. The cultured meat industry requires some of the same materials to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but unlike the pharmaceutical industry, it needs to grow large quantities of cells and sell them at grocery store prices. .
