Modern Meat

Vow co-founders George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith weren’t always planning on starting a company. George had been running a startup accelerator on agriculture whilst Tim was determined to start his own vegan company. What brought the two together? A passion for cultivated meat. Now, from their Sydney-based startup, they’re bringing a new take on food, reimagining meat and its meaning in a way seldom done before. In this week’s episode we chat to the pair about their unique approach, as well as the biggest technical challenges being faced in the journey so far. We also discuss the importance of a cell library, governmental support and their predictions of the effect this has for the future of the industry.

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Image: Vow cofounders Tim Noakesmith (left) and George Peppou (right). Source: Business Insider

One thing that has made Vow stand out from the crowd is their non-traditional approach when it comes to cultivated meat, using the cells of species never eaten before.

George: ‘I don’t see a world in 30 years where people are still mainly eating beef, chicken and pork.’

The main reason, George went on to mention, was that with the establishment of many new cultivated meat companies, businesses will need to start differentiating from another.

George: ‘They’re going to start pulling different levers and altering different characteristics of those foods.’

Some of these, previously discussed on our episode with Bianca Le (founder of nonprofit Cellular Agriculture Australia) include altering the nutritional profile of meat by decreasing less desirable components such as saturated fats and increasing appealing aspects such as omega 3.

George: ‘As that happens these are going to drift away from being replicates and start to be differentiated products that will be sold as brands, rather than as beef, chicken or pork.’

Which is exactly what Vow is already from the get-go setting out to do. Instead of waiting for the change to happen in the mainstream, products are already planned to be sold on the basis of their texture, flavour, functionality and nutritional profile, rather than on what they’re made of.

Tim: ‘We don’t care about it being the purest meat product.’

‘Instead we’re asking ourselves the question of what makes the best eating experience’.

For Vow this also means looking at undomesticated animal species. However the question remains, will people be willing to step outside of their normal palette and try animals they’ve never seen as food before?

Tim: ‘The things that will be important in the early days are education: helping people understand what this product exactly is and being extremely transparent.’

‘We’ve seen precedents in history where consumers have been willing to try different things.’

Tim went on to give the example of cereals, with consumers initially being weary of the main ingredients that went into this new kind of food.

Tim: ‘As more choice came on to the shelves and consumers were getting used to the idea of eating cereals, more choices came in and people had to differentiate by brands focussed on the sensory experience.’

To the point where now nobody necessarily thinks of the ingredients in the cereals they’re buying - they simply think of the taste, or other elements of experience that are suited to what the customer desires.

For some however, a current environmental and public health crisis has raised the question of why encourage cultivated meat when we could all just eat more plants?

George: ‘We could all be choosing to eat a solely plant-based diet. But there’s large proportions of the population due to personal preference, the enjoyment of meat as a product or other reasons, that are choosing to eat meat every day. We’re really interested in changing the behaviour of those groups by offering them products that are simply better than what they could eat coming from animals.’

One way of making these products a reality is by creating a cell library which acts as a storage for species’ cells.

George: ‘We can build a library containing many of those species, characterising them as food, understanding how they taste and what they pair well with.’

Currently they have 11 species, with the cell library continuously expanding, being used as a store of ‘ingredients’ to create both single and multi-species products in the future.

Tim: ‘We want to be the best in industry at doing that - creating entirely new foods and then finding the ones that meet consumers where they are.’

But turning a vision into reality isn’t smooth-sailing. When asked about the technical challenges regarding cultivated meat and issues such as cell media, the pair agreed that it was hard work.

George: ‘I don’t think there’s a single part of the cultured meat system which I would describe as anything other than extremely complex.’

‘Cultured media is absolutely one of the big technical challenges for us. Part of the reason for that is you typically have ~60-90 different ingredients in there, most of which are salts, sugars and amino acids.’

Where it gets difficult, George went on to talk about, is that all of these different components have a precise ratio. Add that on top of having 11 species and many more cells in your library and trying to find the optimum combination and composition of ingredients whilst retaining cost-efficiency and yield might get tricky.

But cell media isn’t the only obstacle, with envisioning a scale of production and how to make the process big enough so that it can feed billions of people efficiently also providing a challenge.

George: ‘There’s a lot of different complimentary things that need to come together.’

Tim: ‘Pretty much everything we do is something that someone along the lines have said you’re not going to be able to overcome this.'

Despite the doubt, the pair have gone on to overcome many initial obstacles, tackling each new task day by day. One of which being receiving the support of the Australian government, a process and topic that we were curious to learn more about given the uncertainty of where cultivated meat stands in the Australian landscape.

Tim: ‘The standards and recommendations are set out by Food Standards ANZ which is the regulatory body here, and they’re extremely supportive and extremely interested in cultured meat.’

‘Already on their website they’ve spoken a bit about what cellular agriculture is, and they’re open to the discourse.’

In terms of regulating cultured meat as a product, this part of the process is done on a state-by-state basis.

Tim: ‘It’s up to individual states whether or not they want to adopt the recommendation set up by Food Standards ANZ.’

What does this mean for the future of Vow?

Tim: ‘As long as we’re doing all of the right things and providing all of the right pieces of evidence to suggest this is an incredibly safe thing to eat, then we really see this as something that can exist on Australian shelves in the next couple of years.’

If you’re interested in Vow’s work, you can follow their journey or get in touch via vowfood.com.