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Would you eat lab-grown peacock or crocodile? This company is betting on it

Vow Food is confident it can convert people to kangaroo dumplings instead of lab-grown chicken nuggets.

Would you eat lab-grown peacock or crocodile? This company is betting on it

[Photo: Vow]

BY Talib Visram5 minute read

The NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam has a brand-new installation on display: an enormous woolly mammoth meatball. But while it’s a novel food item made with real mammoth DNA and prepared by a cultivated meat company, no one has tasted it. Not even the founders.

[Photo: Rob Harrison/Vow]

For Australian company Vow Food, the stunt was a showcase of what the emerging tech of the lab-grown meat industry could achieve. Producing unusual proteins has been at Vow’s core since its founding in 2019. It’s not concerned with chicken, beef, or pork; rather crocodile, alpaca, and water buffalo. Its aim is to offer some of these atypical meats to adventurous eaters, who it believes will pay a premium for experimental tasting experiences. And it’s confident that the strategy will allow them to stand out in what’s quickly becoming a crowded market.

[Photo: Vow]

Unlike plant-based meat, cultivated meat is real meat but grown outside of an animal. Companies usually take biopsies from animals to retrieve starter muscle cells, and then stimulate them with growth cells inside huge bioreactors. The first two cell-based products approved for the U.S. market, made by Upside Foods and GOOD Meat, have both been chicken.

But for Vow, an exciting new technology should be about showing the extent of its capabilities. Its initial showcase product, to attract investors, was a kangaroo dumpling. “We can unlock experiences that previously we haven’t been able to with the animals that we could domesticate,” says Tim Noakesmith, co-founder and chief product officer. He says it’s now just as easy to grow cells of a Galapagos turtle as those of a cow.

[Photo: Vow]

He says the exotic meats will be easier to market too, particularly compared to cell-based chicken. Chicken is so familiar, and we know it so well that we’re always going to compare a replica to the real thing, which has been a challenge for plant-based companies. Cultured meat should mimic meat better, because it’s made from real animal cells, but it’s still a risk. He refers to the “uncanny valley”: a phenomenon where lifelike robots are close to humans, but something is fundamentally off, which can trigger unease and even disgust.

Helene Hopfer is an associate professor of food science at Penn State University, whose work focuses on how food processing affects customer perception and acceptance. She agrees with Noakesmith’s assessment. She says food scientists work hard to ensure a certain cookie or beer tastes the same around the world, because people are wary of subtle differences. She says it’s easier to market something for which people have no reference point. “If you’re [saying], ‘This is just like chicken,’ you better make sure that it delivers on chicken,” she says. “I might not want to try peacock, but I have no idea how peacock tastes.”

Peacock is one of the many meats Vow is considering producing; they’ve also had success in initial trials with crocodile. They have an extensive “cell library” containing cell lines of 25 to 30 species.

In some cases, Vow’s scientists have captured the creatures’ cells via biopsies. In others, the cell lines have been developed elsewhere and they can license them, explains James Ryall, Vow’s chief scientific officer. (In the case of the extinct mammoth, they used frozen DNA that had previously been recovered from fossils, and supplemented it with DNA of the African elephant, a close relative.)

[Photo: Vow]

In discussing their inspiration for the variety of meats, the founders have often cited Charles Darwin, who documented eating all kinds of wild animals on his travels, from iguana to puma. His favorite was the agouti, a wild, 20-pound rat from Central and South America.

They are operating under the assumption that many consumers also want to be adventurous. Prices of cell-based meats are so high at the moment that a cultured chicken nugget is much more expensive than a real one. (Although things are starting to shift: Eat Just reported a cost of $50 to make a single nugget in 2019, but it more recently suggested the cost is now on par with regular “high-quality chicken.”) Still, while some are willing to pay more for ethical chicken, Noakesmith suggests they may as well pay a premium for a new sensory experience.

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Hopfer suggests others might pay high prices for eating foods traditional to their cultures but that are hard to access—or that are endangered species. “For certain people, eating turtle is not weird, or eating alpaca is not weird,” she says. But Vow stresses that if their consumer research shows most people find something icky—if there’s no appetite for turtle, say—they won’t waste resources on those.

[Photo: Vow]

There’s probably very little demand for mammoth. So, was the giant meatball purely marketing? Yes, admits Noakesmith, and in fact it was designed in partnership with ad agency Wunderman Thompson. (He adds that we wouldn’t be having our conversation if they’d just made a chicken nugget.) No one tasted it, because it would need rigorous safety testing to determine if we can even digest a protein that hasn’t existed in 5,000 years. That wasn’t worth the investment because they knew they weren’t going to commercialize it.

For the products they do plan to commercialize, they’ll have to go through regulatory processes. While two companies have received FDA approval for cell-based chicken in the U.S., they still need sign-off from the USDA, which Noakesmith says will be more challenging given the agency’s commitment to farmers and ranchers. “We do not have this problem with kangaroo,” he says. Vow has submitted plans in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand to approve their first product: Japanese quail. They hope to launch it soon in Singapore, which has been furthest ahead in cell-based acceptance. They chose the quail because it grows exceptionally fast, and it “also turns out that it’s remarkably delicious,” Noakesmith says.

[Photo: Vow]

But while novelties may work as the tech is emerging, the plan is different for the long term. “I don’t think that the future of meat is eating, necessarily, exotic animals,” Noakesmith says. Over time, he believes there will be a wider acceptance of diverse meats, and they’ll be able to feed more people, sustainably, as prices for lab-grown meat drop.

Because their cell library is so extensive, they’ll be able to mix-and-match different meats, and different cell types of those meats, to create products that serve consumers’ niche demands. They say they’ll be able to combine high-protein cells from one animal with low-fat cells from another; enrich a product with omega-3 acid cells; fortify with high-iron cells—or even add turkey cells for tryptophan for a good night’s sleep.

“[Sometimes] it’ll be, I want a nutrition profile that solves a specific problem for me,” Noakesmith says. “And other times it’ll be: I want something that’s really bloody delicious.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in London, Talib Visram is a Staff Writer at Fast Company in New York, where his digital and print reporting focuses on the social impact of business. A Master’s-trained multimedia journalist, he’s hosted a variety of audio and video programs, and moderated live events More


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