Key Points
But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishesfoie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor..
Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury productan unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat..
The cultivated meat industry needs some of the same ingredients to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but unlike the pharma industry, it needs to grow huge volumes of cells and sell them at grocery store prices...
Thats fine if youre a scientist growing a few cells in a petri dish, but growing a single kilogram of cultivated meat might require tens of liters of media, quickly sending costs sky-rocketing..
Just a few crucial ingredients in cell media are a major factor pushing up costs for cultivated meat companies, most of which are still operating at a tiny scale, producing kilograms of meat per production cycle rather than the tons they are aiming for...
