.jpg "You Can Now Buy Lab-Grown Foie Gras")
Vow’s quail parfait is on the menu at around six restaurants in Singapore, including being sold as a $20 SGD ($15) bar snack and as part of a $250 SGD tasting menu. In Peppou’s telling, going high-end is a way to spin cultivated meat’s high costs and low production volumes as a luxury proposition. “I believe the biggest challenge we have is how to shape consumer sentiment around this category. And the most efficient way to do that in my mind is to be in the most influential places with the relatively limited volume we have available.”
SuperMeat’s Savir says that luxury cultivated meat products “have a place,” but that he is more interested in the mass market where he can complement the current production of meat. That will mean continuing to drive production costs down. One option is to mix cultivated meat with much cheaper plant-based ingredients. Savir says that they’re aiming at products that are around 30 percent cultivated meat cells and 70 percent plant-based ingredients. Several other firms are taking a similar strategy. In Singapore, Eat Just sells cultivated chicken strips that are only 3 percent chicken cells.
The industry is also hoping that customers will pay premium prices because of the potential environmental benefits of making meat outside of animal bodies. Savir says he has spoken with a “very big” pizza company that says replacing just 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultivated chicken would make a substantial dent in its carbon footprint.
Even replacing a fraction of a percent of the $50 billion broiler chicken industry in the US would require a monumental scaling-up of cultivated meat production. “If you’re competing against chicken, which is the lowest-cost meat product, then you either have to go to very large scales or create hybrid products that have lower inclusion rates,” says Swartz of the Good Food Institute. But with investor dollars in short supply, companies are having to get creative about how they plan to get products into the world and achieve many founders’ ultimate goal of displacing at least some conventional meat production.
Even though he’s targeting the luxury market, Peppou says he still isn’t turning a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margin is much better than it would be if he were competing with factory-farmed chicken. “If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying,” he says. “And it’s figuring out ways to not die long enough to get good enough to win in a market which probably doesn’t exist yet.”
That means the route ahead for Vow might not look totally different from other cultivated meat companies. “The volumes are going to be low, it’s mostly going to be in restaurants. They’re going to be iterating on these products over time before they get any sort of mass market entry point,” says Swartz. “In the short term, what I’m looking forward to is getting more people that are trying this for the first time, not trying it because they’re excited about cultivated meat, but generally because they’re interested.”
Updated 11-19-2024 9:00 pm GMT: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Vow’s cultivated foie gras contains 70 percent quail cells.
