In 2018, I was roaming the streets of San Francisco with one thing on my mind: finding an Impossible Burger. The so-called “veggie burger that bleeds” was supposedly converting meat-eaters across the United States after launching at David Chang’s Manhattan restaurant, Momofuku Nishi, two years prior.

As a child, I dreamt of being a vet. As an adult, I’ve never quite reconciled my affection for animals with the pleasure I take in eating them. The Impossible promised a way forward. I was determined to try one before flying home to Australia, where the product was yet to launch.

I found my white whale at Umami Burger, a Grill’d-like chain with timber stools and faux-distressed signage touting “cold beer and liquor”. With my first bite, I understood the rave reviews from chefs and food writers across the US. It did taste meaty, thanks to the inclusion of heme, the molecule that tints blood red. The burger was passable. I finished the meal feeling hopeful about the future of food. But as the mock meat settled in my guts, something was off. I didn’t feel the usual satisfaction.

Americans haven’t been feeling it either. After a decade of growth, sales of plant-based meat and seafood alternatives fell 28 per cent between 2022 and 2024, while regular meat sales set a new record in 2024. (The picture is rosier in Australia, though up-to-date figures won’t be released until next year.)

“US consumers say they’d be more willing to eat plant-based meat if it tasted better, became more affordable, and overall provided a clear value,” noted the Good Food Institute, the group compiling the data about plant-based alternatives. In other words, the products are pricey and not as good as they need to be. Consumers have sent a clear message: they’re not prepared to give up meat solely for altruistic reasons.

But what if we could eat meat without killing animals? The question sounds nonsensical, yet isn’t. Research into “cultivated”, “cultured” or “cell-based” meat – real, living cells grown outside the animal – began almost 60 years ago, though the idea itself is at least 30 years older.

Still, this is a bleeding-edge technology. Singapore was the first jurisdiction to approve cultured meat for sale, in 2020. Since then, just four companies out of an estimated 150 global startups have got their products past regulators: two in California, one in Israel and Vow, in inner-city Sydney. Last week the company received permission to sell in Australia, two years after Food Standards Australia New Zealand began assessing its application.

Vow’s vision is audacious, but makes economic sense in a way the Impossible Burger never has. It wants to make “never before seen” meats that are different and better than what we’re used to, rather than failing to re-create what we already know and love. As per the website: “When was the last time you tasted something for the first time?” The analogy is this: when Tesla brought its first cars to market, it didn’t include a vestigial exhaust pipe for the sake of familiarity. Why should meat be any different?

“This is about so much more than an alternative to animal agriculture,” the company wrote in a 2021 statement, following a $7.7 million funding round from several of Australia’s top venture capital firms. “It’s about a category of products totally distinct from, and better than, what animals are capable of producing.”

Proponents of cellular agriculture say it has the potential to improve food security, reduce or eliminate animal suffering and curb the vast environmental impact of farming animals. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates livestock farming alone is responsible for 12 per cent of humanity’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also a major driver of deforestation globally, reducing tree cover and shrinking wild animal habitats.

Opponents see cultured meat as expensive, disgusting, unproven, unnecessary and/or nutritionally suspect. “Meat’s a really complex, nutritionally dense product [containing] multiple cell types,” professor Paul Wood, an award-winning microbiologist, told ABC News last year. “When you grow a single cell line, it’s not going to have the same levels of iron and calcium and zinc … it’s not going to have any B12. You’re going to have to add those things back. We don’t know, long-term, what the nutritional profile is going to be.”

Vegans and vegetarians also ask a valid question: if animal suffering and the environment are so important, why doesn’t everyone just stop eating meat? This is the best option, yet 85 per cent of Australians still want to eat meat at least occasionally. Cultured products promise to meet this need while one day – possibly, maybe – being inarguably better for the environment.

Last year, a team from the University of California published a landmark life cycle assessment paper on cultured meat. “Our results indicate that cultured meat is not necessarily a less resource-intensive protein product than conventional meat and, in fact, may lead to significantly greater environmental impact if the industry is unable to fully transition from pharmaceutical-grade ingredients to food/feed-grade inputs,” the team wrote, while acknowledging a level of “model uncertainty” and “incomplete data” in its assessment. Some people in the cultured meat industry criticised the paper for making incorrect assumptions.

Despite the ongoing debate, to date Vow has raised more than $100 million, with high-profile investors including Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes’s Grok Ventures. Again following Tesla’s playbook, the company hopes to bust the cultured meat taboo at the top end first, targeting food’s main tastemakers – fine-dining chefs. Money from those sales will be used to develop lower-cost, mass market products, as the Tesla Model S led to the more affordable Model 3.

So far, it’s working. In Singapore, a mix of 15 high-end and mid-market restaurants have been serving Vow’s cultured Japanese quail parfait and foie gras for 12 months. Within weeks, the same products will appear at Australian restaurants Kitchen by Mike, The Waratah and Nel in Sydney and From Here by Mike, Hotel Lincoln and Bottarga in Melbourne, with “20 to 30” more in the pipeline. Vow doesn’t disclose its prices publicly, but says its products are slightly cheaper than comparable conventional meats in Australia, and slightly more expensive in Singapore.

It’s a dreary, monsoonal day when I land in Sydney to visit Vow’s headquarters. I’m dropped on a quiet, leafy street in Alexandria, a light industrial area five kilometres from the city. The company’s 70-odd employees work in two buildings on either side of a large commercial laundry. The office is a two-storey warehouse with a peaked roof, about the same size as a four-bed home in the ’burbs. There’s a postcard-sized iron plaque by the front door with “Vow” written on it in molten, blacksmith-y letters, but that’s it. I’ll initially spend several hours here tasting products with co-founder and CEO George Peppou (more on that later).

Afterwards, he leads me down the street to a much larger warehouse, with its own carpark out front. We cut through a frenetic front room filled with workers standing at computers, monitoring what’s happening out back. Behind, a noisy production floor, about the length and width of two tennis courts laid end to end. We don high-vis vests and meet chief technology officer Ines Lizaur, a mechanical engineer who last worked at Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Eager and earnest in that particular American way, she cuts a slight figure in brown Doc Martens, blue jeans and a loose linen shirt.

“One of the funnest ways of working is when you’re doing something for the first time,” she says, when I ask what brought her to Sydney. “And I think there are very few industries where you’re truly doing something for the first time. Cultured meat is one of those.”

Vow’s process begins with taking an almond-sized biopsy from the relevant animal, whereby individual cells are isolated in a lab. Over the course of months, the cells are weaned off animal-derived products and adapted to grow in liquid suspension, rather than on a surface. This is a difficult process with a high failure rate, but once complete, animal products aren’t required again. The cells graduate from the lab, where they can be reproduced infinitely in the factory – hence, referring to cultured meat as “lab-grown” isn’t particularly accurate, even if the small labs at Vow share a wall with the factory section.

As I find out, the process is more akin to making beer – and two current Vow employees came directly from Sydney breweries. Peppou drifts away to chat to a few people. Lizaur walks me down a line of five interconnected and increasingly large “bioreactors”, or conical stainless steel tanks, which run down the right-hand length of the room. The tallest is two storeys, with a staircase to reach the top. Pipes, hoses, gauges and taps run every which way.

The left-hand side is dominated by a glassed-in industrial kitchen, where workers in white coveralls and face masks are cooking and packaging the harvested cells. At the rear of the factory, there’s a small workshop filled with power tools, where a sole tradie fixes and builds on demand. Production processes and the equipment needed to execute them are far from perfected.

“If you kind of look from right to left, you’ll see the maturity of our hardware improve and progress. It’s kind of a cool evolution,” Lizaur says. “We learnt a lot along the way, and one of the key inflection points for Vow was our decision to bring a lot of our engineering and fabrication in house.”

I recognise a lot of the equipment from writing about beer, and even some of the jargon Lizaur’s throwing out, like “osmotic pressure”, or the pressure exerted on a cell’s wall as it sits in suspension. During the culturing process, cells will die or stagnate if they’re not kept at the correct density and pressure, hence their progression from an initial 200-litre tank to a 20,000-litre giant nicknamed Andromeda. Likewise, cells exposed to pathogens or toxic compounds won’t develop into a viable product. Infection or contamination is difficult, if not impossible, during the production phase.

Inside each tank, the cells divide and multiply in a body-temperature “nutrient broth” containing sugars, amino acids, proteins, fats, vitamins and growth factors. Some cultured meat companies have been criticised for using fetal bovine serum (derived from cow foetuses) in their liquid medium, but Vow’s liquid medium contains no animal products. Critical gasses like oxygen and nitrogen are bubbled through the mixture, mimicking an animal’s circulatory system, where air and food are broken down and sent around the body to nourish cells.

End-to-end, the growth stage takes about 100 days. Andromeda is emptied two or three times per week, when optical turbidity sensors detect the cells inside have reached peak density. Not completely though – like a sourdough starter, a quarter of the cells are always left in the tank, to be topped up and continue growing.

We stop next to Andromeda, and a squat machine making the bulk of the noise. “It’s a centrifuge,” Lizaur yells over the din. The engine-like machine spins the harvested slurry, separating the cells from the liquid medium, much as cheese is separated from whey. Vow’s first production method yielded about 1500 kilograms of meat each month. A new process has boosted that number to 20,000 kilograms, and there’s room to add six more tanks as large as Andromeda. With regulatory approval mere weeks away at the time of my visit, the company is clearly preparing for the imminent possibility of stratospheric growth, six months after shedding 30 per cent of its workforce.

Peppou, the CEO, is the man with the plan – and on paper, the right background to pull it off. The 33-year-old grew up in Sydney’s Upper North Shore, on the edge of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. After high school, he studied biochemistry at The University of Sydney, while also considering a career in kitchens. The year was 2009. Molecular gastronomy, the intersection of food and chemistry popularised by the likes of Heston Blumenthal, was at its peak. Following unpaid stages at top Sydney restaurants Tetsuya’s, Aria, Rockpool and Restaurant Assiette, Peppou spent a month at home developing carbonated orange slices using a pressure cooker and dry ice.

The work landed him an offer to work at Blumenthal’s UK test kitchen – one he turned down after finding out he’d be fine-tuning pastry recipes for months on end. “I’m not the person you want perfecting something,” he says. “There are better people on the team for that.”

We’re chatting in a strange little kitchenette-slash-greeting-room directly behind the front door of Vow’s smaller office building. Peppou has a boyish, puppy dog energy about him, enhanced by a head of bouncy dark curls. He answers my questions slowly and thoughtfully, his eyes and smile sparking when he lands on something that tickles him – which is often. A couple of times, he gets up to open the door for lanyarded employees, who are flowing in and out for coffee and lunch.

The restaurant world wasn’t for him, Peppou decided. Staying in Sydney, he pivoted to an “absolutely batshit crazy” job as an inventor, sub-contracting for Intellectual Ventures, an American company once called the “most hated company in tech” for its practice of developing and hoarding tens of thousands of patents. Over his nearly three-year tenure, he was deployed to projects as diverse as increasing contrast in endoscopic ultrasound imaging, starch recovery for PepsiCo and “something for a Chinese coal company”.

“I got exposed to agriculture, where food comes from, which was fascinating,” he says. “Lift up the covers of the food system and you’re like, ‘Wow, this whole thing is held together with string and chewing gum.’ It’s genuinely staggering how available food is, given how fragile the system behind it is.” (This has been laid particularly bare in the wake of the pandemic, war in Ukraine, 2019-20 bushfires and other climate-change events.)

By this time, we’ve moved to an adjacent tasting room with four high stools and a marble counter. It feels like a high-end omakase bar. The first of several dishes, a butter with smoked quail cells mixed through, is brought out in an elegant white bowl with ruffled edges. The butter itself came from cows, but in future it could be made from literal air, something companies in California and Finland have just commercialised for sale. We spread it onto seeded sourdough. It’s rich, smoky and moreish, with a bone marrow kick at the back of the palate. It tastes like many of the compound butters I’ve eaten at fine-dining restaurants, and betrays nothing of its true origin. How that bodes for Vow’s mission to be better than conventional meat, I can’t say.

Towards the end of Peppou’s time inventing, frustration began to dilute his initial joy in finding solutions. “What looked from the outside to be a technical problem, when you got inside, was a people problem. And that was a continued theme, over and over again,” he says, citing an example where a union stood in the way of developing a meat-grading app which had the potential to replace some workers.

There is, it should be said, a tiny hint of Silicon Valley’s disruptive ideology here, where humans always come second to technological progress. Peppou is accordingly fluent in the hippie-utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley’s most famous founders. Vow employees are called “Vowsers” and at one point, we discuss Peppou’s friend’s company, Silo, which is tinkering with the biology of magic mushrooms to make them more suitable for clinical uses.

But Peppou might argue Australia needs more people who think like this. “Americans have this wonderful sense of unearned confidence and optimism,” he says. “If you ask [people] to do an impossible thing, Australians will say, ‘Here’s all the reasons it won’t work, here’s all the challenges.’ Americans will be like, ‘Yep, on it, off I go.’

“Australia as a whole – it feels like we have so many of the right ingredients. We have really good raw talent, but I’ve found it really difficult to hire the leaders locally that bring the right attitude and optimism.”

Of the three women and three men on Vow’s senior leadership team, Peppou is the only Australian. The chief financial officer is a Brit, based in New York. The general counsel is an American, who lives in Taipei. The rest, also American, live in Sydney and include former SpaceX engineer Lizaur.

“There’s this wave of software technology businesses that have shown you can build great companies in Australia,” Peppou says, referring to the likes of Canva, Atlassian and Airwallex. “And now I’m really hoping we’ll see a similar wave of more hard technologies.”

By 2018, Peppou was teaching and consulting at University of Technology Sydney while also running Growlab, an agrifood tech accelerator. He never wanted to become a founder, he says. He was more interested in helping others strengthen the creaking food system: “But I got really frustrated that no one was solving that problem in a way I thought would work.”

That same year, he was introduced to branding guy Tim Noakesmith, who turned out to be the marketing yin to Peppou’s technical yang. They started Vow together in 2019. Noakesmith has stepped away from operations but remains a shareholder and sits on the board.

Dish two arrives – a grazing platter with grapes, cheeses, lavash crackers and a quenelle of light-brown cultured quail parfait, similar to pâté. Peppou compliments Kevin Condún, the Irish food scientist who’s cosplaying as our chef, on the neatness of his quenelle. The parfait, a whipped, airy product, is 60 per cent quail cells, plus butter, shallots, tapioca starch, port wine, brandy, garlic, olive oil, spices and fruit and vegetable concentrates.

Vow sells the product frozen, in a piping bag. This, Peppou says, has been a revelation for some kitchens, which can’t find or afford chefs capable of de-veining poultry livers, cooking and setting them correctly (“it’s very, very hard to make a good, light parfait”). This, though? Any apprentice can squeeze it out, even if it means killing a once-valuable skill, the way computers have largely made penmanship obsolete. This parfait, and Vow’s foie gras, have been appearing at burger and bagel shops in Singapore, obliterating their former status as luxury foods and pulling them more towards condiment territory.

The parfait – which the team considered calling a mousse – is more interesting to me than the butter. Like fairy floss, it dissolves on the tongue almost supernaturally, leaving virtually no trace. I’m a little bemused, until Peppou explains the fat content has been reduced. With a regular parfait, that fat coats the mouth and demands a sip of wine to wash it away. I wonder what this will mean for food and wine pairings.

Then there’s something else, some uncanny valley aspect I can’t quite articulate. The flavour is right, but not right. Peppou smiles and helps me out again, pointing out that the offal-y, iron-y taint of liver has intentionally been dialled back, which immediately clicks for me. It tastes good, just not in the way I’m used to.

These adjustments supposedly came from chefs wanting something different and more accessible for everyday customers, who may never have tried pâté or parfait before. Humans learn to love the bitterness of coffee, the funk of blue cheese and yes, the intensity of liver, but they’re not automatic yums. “The vast majority of people that try this, they wouldn’t be able to remember the last parfait they had,” Peppou says confidently.

A few weeks later, I meet Sydney chef Mike McEnearney at his new Melbourne restaurant, From Here by Mike, where house-made chicken liver pâté is a signature.

McEnearney is one of Sydney’s best-known chefs and recently became an ambassador for Vow, after a blind tasting where the food’s true nature wasn’t revealed until the end. “I make pâté,” he says. “I’m good at making pâté. That’s my schtick.” Still, he thought the parfait tasted “really good” and “whoever made it has done a great job”.

McEnearney’s devotion to produce, and small-scale farming, is well known. He’s been the creative director of Carriageworks Farmers Market for a decade. Why on earth would he want to get behind meat grown in vitro?

“This, to me, is just food farmed a different way. That’s the way we need to think about it,” he says. “It won’t replace, it’ll support. It’ll give people another protein, something more nutritious to eat at home, that’s not steak or lamb, et cetera. We need ingredients like this. Look at American beef production, it’s horrendous. I see the long game. It has to start somewhere.”

Still, he’s sceptical about Australians’ appetite for cultured meat. He thinks Vow needs something more recognisable, like a fillet, to gain widespread acceptance. Technically, this is far more expensive and difficult to scale, with common approaches including growing animal cells on 3D scaffolds of plant-based proteins, or using gelatinous additives to create a spongy, fibrous structure.

Even then, explaining the product to diners in a few weeks will be a challenge (“we’re used to talking about trees and cows”). Magic Valley, Australia’s other cultured meat company, hopes to enter the market with “value-added” products like frozen dumplings and sausage rolls, which will introduce mince-like cultured meat in a more familiar, unchallenging way.

Peppou and I return to this topic of familiarity and acceptance several times. For someone who quit inventing due to an abundance of “people problems”, he’s taking on what is, at heart, an incredibly knotty people problem. A 2021 study with almost 400 participants in the US and UK found 35 per cent of meat-eaters and 55 per cent of vegetarians “felt too disgusted by cultured meat to try eating it”, due to “perceived unnaturalness”.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand ran a similar survey while assessing Vow’s application, using more than 2000 participants. Seventy-four per cent of people have “either never heard of cell-cultured meat or have heard of it but know very little or nothing about it”. Sixty-two per cent were “currently not confident in the safety of cell-cultured meat”. But 52 per cent were “at least open to being persuaded to try it”.

Peppou has charted a pragmatic course for Vow by initially focusing on simple, paste-like products rather than the more technically difficult fillets, even if those products might be more readily embraced. In his mind, there’s no point adding complexity and cost to a product there may be no demand for.

“The first question with cultured meat is, are people going to gravitate towards it and accept this category full stop?” he says. “I looked at it and said, ‘Let’s focus on bringing products to market and answering the most important question first.’”

Of course, Vow isn’t waiting for an answer. It’s ploughed into developing “whole cuts” in-house using alginates (gummy substances derived from seaweed) and externally with a company in Europe that spins cell proteins into fibres that can be “knitted” into a 3D structure. That second product could debut as early as this year. After that, it plans to launch products using cultured fish, peacock and crocodile cells. (Contrary to 2020’s outrage-bait headlines, Peppou says the company has never tried to make cultured zebra meat.)

Dish three comes out. The tasting is starting to feel like a regular lunch with a friend. Peppou and I bite into dainty squares of regular supermarket toast, topped with pinkish Wagyu and cultured quail foie gras. It’s a textural home run, the brittle, chewy and soft parts all complementing each other.

The foie gras’s ingredients are a touch spookier than the parfait’s. Hydrogenated coconut oil, sunflower oil, fava bean protein, konjac, yeast extract, carrageenan and more fruit and veg concentrates – so far, so real. But then: potassium hydroxide. Consult Google or ChatGPT and you’ll get alarming responses about drain cleaner and paint remover. Yes, but it’s also a widely used food additive, better known as lye. Traditional pretzels are dipped in it before baking, to develop colour. This sort of context will likely be omitted when mis- and dis-information about cultured meat inevitably begin circulating.

Like the parfait, the foie gras is less offal-y and iron-y than it should be, but it’s harder to tell when it’s paired with other foods this way. It underscores Peppou’s idea that, “This is not an alternative or a replacement to meat. This is ‘and’.”

I start thinking about a near future where foie gras isn’t an acquired taste, where people raised on the cultured version think the original tastes tainted and wrong. Vow’s leaning into it with this first product range, which is cleverly titled “Forged”. Forged because it’s been crafted, but also because it’s a knock-off.

The fourth and final product in the debut range is a tallow candle, made from rendered cultured quail fat and inspired by a similar dish at Sydney restaurant Bistecca. It’s brought into the tasting room on a white dinner plate and lit in front of us, where it begins to melt. As I mop up the drippings with bread, so do I.

This is what I’ve been looking for – a full-throttle product that hasn’t been tweaked. It has a pure, fatty richness, much like ghee. I can’t stop dabbing at it, and thinking about how good it would be for frying chips, cooking popcorn or fat-washing cocktails. I’m surprised and a little disappointed that it’s mostly hydrogenated coconut oil, with just 15 per cent cultured quail cells.

Later, as Peppou walks me out of the factory and into the gloomy day, the chat naturally turns to the future and Vow’s impending entry into the local market.

“Working in the frontier of food does feel like this strange combination of really exciting culinary adventure and also this quite intense responsibility,” he says. “What we do over the next six months in Australia is going to decide what this category looks like. If we really screw it up, that’s it. If we do a really good job, we’re going to shape the food that millions of people eat.”

The writer travelled to Sydney as a guest of Vow.