The strange future of lab-grown meat

The quail parfait glistens on my plate, smeared across a disc of fried heirloom masa. At first glance, it looks like the kind of fine-dining fare you’ll find at many high-end restaurants: a rich, rosy paste topped with pickled pepper, an edible flower, and a dusting of cotija. But its conventional presentation masks a deeper truth. This meal is unorthodox, even radical. In some ways, it’s unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The parfait on my plate wasn’t made in the traditional way of pâté and foie gras, from liver. It was grown from the connective tissue cells of a Japanese quail embryo harvested years ago and genetically induced to multiply forever in the lab. And it’s being served to me at a Climate Week event in New York by Joe Turner, chief financial officer of the Australian biotech startup Vow.  

To call the quail “lab-grown meat” would be a misnomer. This jellylike version of quail was grown in a genuine cell-meat factory, the first and largest of its kind. Specifically, in a 30-foot-tall, 15,000-liter tank at Vow’s plant in Sydney, where, as of this writing, the company can produce 2,000 pounds of quail every month. That’s a minuscule amount compared to volumes at conventional meat facilities but represents a huge step forward for a technology that, over the past decade, has built its reputation almost entirely on serving only tantalizing little bites at one-off press tastings.

And Vow is just getting started. With nearly $50 million in funding from the likes of Blackbird Ventures, Prosperity7, and Toyota Ventures (which sponsored the Climate Week event), the company recently installed a second large bioreactor—20,000 liters this time, 33% bigger than the first. With both vessels online, the company estimates it will soon be cranking out 100 tons of cultivated quail each year.

 All of this may seem to contradict my own previous reporting: a recent investigative essay for The New York Times describing how the fledgling cultivated meat sector had been derailed by economic and technical hurdles, despite years of hype, a series of landmark regulatory approvals, and $3 billion in investment.

Upside Foods, based in Berkeley, California, raised more than $600 million to scale a chicken fillet prototype it turned out it could only make by hand in tiny test tubes, while Alameda, California-based Eat Just’s attempt to build a meat factory 50 times bigger than Vow’s ended in lawsuits, financial trouble, and very little cultivated chicken. The sector’s boosters had promised to simulate the meats many of us grew up eating—beef, chicken, and pork, minus the suffering and greenhouse gas emissions. But today the industry has barely any product available. It’s time, I wrote, to acknowledge the truth: That dream is dead.

So how is Vow poised to ship product by the truckload? By giving up on the familiar and embracing the strange. Instead of trying to produce chicken nuggets and burgers, Vow has focused on what big steel tanks of cells can reliably deliver in the short term: outlandish niche products for the luxury market, a new class of foods that Vow CEO George Peppou affectionately calls “weird meat.”

Weird meat is a departure from what the cell-meat industry originally promised. It’ll be expensive, to start with. (As of November, Vow was selling its quail parfait to four restaurants in Singapore for $100 a pound.) It’ll feature tastes and textures that don’t exist in nature. And it’ll be made from animals that people aren’t used to eating. Think crocodile, peacock, songbird, and more. Last year, Vow made international news after its “mammoth meatball”—an enormous, one-off prototype that mixed elephant cells and prehistoric woolly mammoth DNA—led to a viral clip on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Ultimately, Vow hopes building a robust luxury market for weird meats will give it a chance to gradually lower costs further through continued R&D—though it’ll first need to normalize the idea of eating offbeat species. As I look down at my quail parfait, it strikes me that I’ve never eaten quail before. I take a bite, and the spread is as light and melty as whipped butter, with subtle mineral notes I associate with liver. It represents the start of a new, ambiguous era—one in which cultivated meat will finally be available, just not in the way anyone expected.

On a September afternoon, Peppou took me on a virtual tour of the Vow facilities in Sydney. Peppou is a former chef who once ran Growlab, an agtech-focused accelerator for Australian deeptech incubator Cicada Innovations, which launched more than a dozen startups.

Our first stop was the more modest R&D center that Vow calls Factory 1, where staffers spent years experimenting in smaller vessels. That area looked more like what I’ve come to expect from cultivated meat production: a few little tanks and some laminar hoods.

But Factory 1, despite its conventional appearance, has hosted unprecedented and frequently bizarre experiments. Peppou always knew he wouldn’t be making chicken tenders and pork patties. To date, the company has played with cell lines from more than 50 different animal species, including alpaca, buffalo, kangaroo, peacock, sea turtle, sea urchin, wallaby, and whale.

Some prototypes even combined cells from different species. Vow initially planned to go to market with a product called Morsel—a mix of quail and crocodile cells. Ryan Clift, the chef-owner of Tippling Club, a Singapore restaurant that currently serves Vow’s quail parfait on its 22-course tasting menu, told me the result had been astounding. “Not commercially viable—ever,” he said. “But when it was pan-fried, to this day, I honestly swear it’s one of the best things I’ve ever put in my mouth. It had the fibers and textures of a Scottish langoustine. It was mind-blowing.”

Morsel never made the cut, in part because the idea of a hybrid reptile-bird meat confused restaurant customers. “You’d start explaining it, and you’d just watch their brains sort of breaking,” Peppou told me.

But Morsel wasn’t just conceptually problematic. The crocodile cells also grew too slowly to power a commercial process. Which gets to the root cause of Vow’s obsession with novelty: When it comes to raising cell populations in growth fluid, not all species perform equally well. The domesticated livestock we eat today might make sense from the perspective of animal husbandry, but their cells aren’t the best match for giant stainless-steel tanks. The most fundamental problem is immortalization. In order to grow indefinitely, cells need to be stressed until they develop “variations”—what we’d call mutations—that circumvent their natural tendency to die after a few dozen divisions, a self-limiting phenomenon called the Hayflick limit. Cells from bigger, more complex creatures tend to be harder to immortalize. Mosa Meats, the company that produced the first lab-grown burger more than a decade ago, has opted to biopsy live animals continually rather than use immortalized cells.

But even many immortalized cells won’t thrive at scale outside the body. Some grow too slowly, like the crocodile. Others are too delicate to handle the rigors of life inside a bioreactor, whirring around in bubbly liquid at high speeds. Others are just temperamental, resisting growth at the high densities needed for meat. Beef, chicken, and pork aren’t necessarily the best candidates, and Vow has found that undomesticated species may be more viable: According to a 2021 presentation, cells from certain songbird species grow three times faster than those from cows.

Peppou’s team settled on quail because the cells are hearty and quick-growing, and they taste a little like liver, making them good for parfaits, as well as for the foie gras Vow has in the works. “We just kind of grew them and they tasted like that,” he said. And since bioreactors brew up a wet cell slurry, not anything we’d recognize as muscle tissue, quail cells in an unstructured pâté present “a far lower technical barrier,” Peppou said. This flipped the standard cultivated meat playbook on its head: Rather than trying to grow what we eat, Vow decided to grow what grows best.

Peppou saw opportunity in scarcity: “Let’s go to market with a luxury product that’s sold on the basis of novelty and exclusivity,” he said. “As soon as we’re in the hundreds of dollars a kilo, there’s probably some market, no matter how small it is.” Clift, the Singapore chef, agrees: He sees major potential for Vow foie gras to displace the conventional version at restaurants across the world, where chefs will be willing to pay top dollar for a cruelty-free version of a prized food that’s currently produced in a deeply problematic way. When we spoke this fall, he also said the Vow foie gras isn’t quite ready to go on his menu after many iterations — the flavor was still “a little off” compared to the real thing, though the texture is now “freakishly identical.”

Since then, Vow has announced its first sale of the product, which it calls Forged Gras, with a rollout underway in Hong Kong and Singapore. In a press release, the company called it “a new experience altogether”—and not just for being cruelty-free cultivated meat. Until now, quail had never been used to make foie gras: They’re tiny, fine-boned birds, and the idea of force-feeding them like a goose to fatten their livers makes little practical sense.

The willingness to sell a weird, exorbitantly priced product gave Vow the latitude to experiment with process design—an approach that’s yielded some astonishing results. Under the direction of head of manufacturing Ines Lizaur, a former SpaceX engineer who joined the company in late 2023, Vow radically streamlined its production line. The new, custom-made 20,000-liter reactor in Factory 2 is more reliable and costs 70% less than the off-the-shelf version. That’s helped Vow lower its costs to less than $50 a pound for raw cell slurry. The company is also rolling out a new production approach that drops its unit economics even lower, though processing, marketing, distribution, and point-of-sale markups will continue to add additional costs.

Peppou took me out a back door into a parking lot that Vow shares with a Mercedes storeroom. Factory 2 loomed beyond the lot. At 21,500 square feet, it is the biggest—and as of this writing, the only—commercial-scale cultivated meat facility in the world. I was the first journalist to see it.

We entered what seemed like a standard commercial food factory—walk-in freezers, stuff on pallets. Steel reactors of various size, like Russian nesting dolls, all with Lion King names: Timon and Pumbaa, Simba, and Scar. At the center stood a towering 15,000-liter vessel, Mufasa, about half-filled with quail cells and growth media. On the day of my tour, there was a big empty space reserved for the custom 20,000-liter vessel that Vow started assembling in late September. 

Pharma companies have been growing cells in tanks this large for decades, for vaccine production and other medical uses. But no one has ever attempted anything on this scale for food. Yet, in terms of feeding people, it’s tiny. A ton of product a month? That’s less meat than you get from three cows. Even 100 tons a year, the projected yield once both reactors are running, will produce about as much meat as 400 head of cattle, a scale U.S. ranchers would consider to be a modest family business. For context, 300 million cattle are slaughtered annually worldwide for meat—not to mention some 75 billion chickens. And that meat doesn’t cost $100 a pound. Peppou told me that if certain economies of scale can be achieved, Vow’s cultured cells could one day be grown for single-digit dollars a pound. But that’s for raw cell slurry, which needs additional processing to resemble food, all before a series of costly markups. Conventional chicken, meanwhile—for all its environmental and ethical problems—costs mere cents per pound to produce and retails for about three bucks.

Before Peppou can unlock lower costs through scale, he needs to create demand for “weird meat” products that no one ever asked for. Whether that’s even possible “is a massive open question,” he acknowledged.

Currently, Vow’s quail is only approved in Singapore, a tiny country of around 6 million with a big appetite for unusual food experiences. That approval also clears it for sale in Hong Kong, and the company expects approvals from Australia and New Zealand in the coming months, as well as potentially the U.S. by 2026, which would put hundreds of millions of customers within reach. But only a small percentage will ever even try it, much less become regular buyers. Even at the global scale, foie gras is roughly a $1 billion market, less than 1/1,000th of the meat industry’s total footprint.

Replacing conventional foie gras with Vow’s products may eventually be achievable—and would be an animal welfare win. But can Vow’s approach address larger environmental issues? At this stage, the company’s process is greener than beef production: Sure, all that stainless steel still results in plenty of emissions, but the factory itself is powered by 100 kilowatts of solar. Waste (yes, suspended cells still excrete!) is treated and flushed into the Sydney sewers. But even if cultivated meat’s footprint turns out to be much lower, it will only have meaningful impact if it can displace large amounts of carbon-intensive cattle and overfished marine species.

This creates a catch-22 for Vow: To justify scaling up, it needs to increase demand, but demand depends on lowering costs by scaling up. As Peppou looks for ways to sell more quail more quickly, he’s in talks with at least one airline—hoping to make Vow’s unearthly product a fixture of the skies. The company is also working toward a “structured” meat product, which uses a physical process to shape quail cells into something like a hunk of flesh. Peppou says the product, internally called “quailfish”—it apparently tastes like quail, with the mouthfeel of fish—will be ready by the end of this year. He hopes it might appeal to iron-deficient people who don’t eat beef. (The quailfish has high iron content.)

“That’s not a big market, but it does peel off one very small and very highly motivated group of consumers,” he said. It’s part of a larger strategy to use cultivated meat’s customizability to launch products that “really solve a problem”—whether it’s a nutritional or environmental or ethical problem—“for a very specific niche that’s willing to pay a significant premium.”

So Vow’s plan for growth is both fast and slow. After the 20,000-liter reactor is operational, Peppou plans to rinse and repeat, adding reactor after reactor in a bid to increase output dramatically in the coming years. (That is, as long as people keep buying.) That’s a breakneck pace for Vow, but it’s almost imperceptible at the scale of human eating.

“Even if you gave me unlimited money and I had 10 years to stick as much stainless steel in the ground as possible, we’re still a niche product in 10 years,” he explained. “Even in our best-case production ramp, if everything goes really well, we’re still a fraction of black caviar production.”

Ultimately, Peppou doesn’t want to get stuck making rich-people food. He and his team hope to become a global brand that touches millions of regular folk. But it’s yet unclear how Vow will capture the massive scale needed to lower costs and break out of the high-end niche market.

The interim feels a little unsavory. It’s not hard to imagine the world’s billionaires patting themselves on the back, enjoying mouthfuls of no-kill foie gras on their private jets, while the rest of us remain mired in an ethically compromised system. Meanwhile, the path to a larger market will require stretching meat’s cultural and biological parameters—changing norms about its cost, about its composition, about the animal species we think of as delicious. Even under the rosiest scenario, that’s a messy process that takes time.

In the nearer term, Peppou has a more modest hope: that as Vow grows, weird meat will start to seem a little less weird. He sees potential parallels with the Impossible Burger, which originally made headlines for the way it “bleeds” like meat, but that quickly became normalized.

“The initial phase was like, ‘Oh, my God, they use heme and genetic modification.’ And then it was in the supermarket, and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah. It’s a plant-based burger,’” he said.

I think back to the Climate Week tasting, how normal it all seemed. From a marketing standpoint, the quail was the focus; but on the plate, it clearly wasn’t the point. It served mostly as a springboard for other ingredients—the sweet tang of pickled pepper, the earthy notes of mushroom. For all our attachment to animal flesh, that’s sometimes the purpose meat serves: to imbue other, non-meat ingredients with that touch of the sublime. Sure, Vow’s parfait won’t do much to sate a hankering for a big, juicy steak—but what about all those other dishes, where just a touch of animal will do? Do we really need to know that a literal chicken, pig, or cow died to provide that ineffable quality? Or can we be content, as long as we can still have those complex flavors, to find them wherever they are? That’s where Vow’s products stand to have the most immediate impact, long before many people ever taste them. To sow doubt about our loyalty to a vast, powerful system that comes with terrible costs. To inspire us and whet our curiosity, urging us to wonder what might be.