 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cultured meat |
| Founded | 2019 [1] |
| Founders | George Peppou, Tim Noakesmith |
| Headquarters | Sydney , Australia |
Area served | Singapore [2] |
Key people | George Peppou, CEO |
| Products | Forged Parfait, a cultured meat product from Japanese Quail DNA [2] |
Number of employees | 65 |
| Website | eatvow |
Vow is an Australian company that grows cultured meat for commercial distribution, [3] and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia. [4]
Vow was founded in 2019 [1] by George Peppou (CEO) and Tim Noakesmith (CCO). [5] [6] In July 2019, Vow demonstrated a kangaroo dumpling, the first non-farmed meat demonstrated using cultured meat technology. [1] [7] In August 2020 they demonstrated a further five species in partnership with Australian chef Neil Perry. [8] During 2020 the company was criticised for plans to produce zebra meat. [9]
In August 2021, the company announced they were developing hybrid products containing cultured meat and ingredients produced using precision fermentation technology. [10] The company said that work was being done in the areas of chicken, crocodile, kangaroo and water buffalo meat. [11] During an interview on The Drum in January 2022, the company announced their first product will be crocodile and launching in Singapore. [12]
In November 2022 Vow announced they are launching Morsel, cultured Umai Quail. [13] In 2023, it developed a "mammoth meatball" as a publicity stunt, which was put on display at Museum Boerhaave. [14] The meatball was made from portions of lamb, mammoth, and African elephant DNA, piecing together DNA similar to the mammoth genome, then grown in a sheep muscle cell. [14] New Zealand and Australian regulatory bodies began reviewing Vow's cultured meat products for regulatory approval in December 2023. [15] Singapore was the first government to approve the meat for commercial sale in early 2024. [16] [17] That month, Vow began selling its first commercial product, Forged Parfait, made with Japanese quail cells. As of 2024, it is only available in Singapore, where cultured meat has been approved by regulators. [2] Regulatory approval in Australia is pending. [16]
It develops and markets cultured meat products. [4] Vow is the name of the company, whereas its consumer brand is called Forged. [2] The meat is grown over a four-week process. [2] Japanese quail cells multiply in a bioreactor with vitamins, amino acids, and minerals. [2] The process is similar to a sourdough culture or brewery. [18] The company produces various meat products using biotechnology to induce stem cells to differentiate into muscle tissue, connective tissue and other tissue types and to manufacture the meat products in bioreactors.
Tissue engineering is a biomedical engineering discipline that uses a combination of cells, engineering, materials methods, and suitable biochemical and physicochemical factors to restore, maintain, improve, or replace different types of biological tissues. Tissue engineering often involves the use of cells placed on tissue scaffolds in the formation of new viable tissue for a medical purpose, but is not limited to applications involving cells and tissue scaffolds. While it was once categorized as a sub-field of biomaterials, having grown in scope and importance, it can be considered as a field of its own.
Organ culture is the cultivation of either whole organs or parts of organs in vitro. It is a development from tissue culture methods of research, as the use of the actual in vitro organ itself allows for more accurate modelling of the functions of an organ in various states and conditions.
Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat among other names, is a form of cellular agriculture wherein meat is produced by culturing animal cells in vitro. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques pioneered in regenerative medicine. Jason Matheny popularized the concept in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat has the potential to mitigate the environmental impact of meat production and address issues regarding animal welfare, food security and human health.
A biopharmaceutical, also known as a biological medical product, or biologic, is any pharmaceutical drug product manufactured in, extracted from, or semisynthesized from biological sources. Different from totally synthesized pharmaceuticals, they include vaccines, whole blood, blood components, allergenics, somatic cells, gene therapies, tissues, recombinant therapeutic protein, and living medicines used in cell therapy. Biologics can be composed of sugars, proteins, nucleic acids, or complex combinations of these substances, or may be living cells or tissues. They are isolated from living sources—human, animal, plant, fungal, or microbial. They can be used in both human and animal medicine.
New Harvest is a donor-funded research institute dedicated to the field of cellular agriculture, focusing on advances in scientific research efforts surrounding cultured animal products. Its research aims to resolve growing environmental and ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock production.
Victimless Leather (2004) is an art piece that represents a leather jacket without killing any animals. It is a prototype of a stitch-less jacket, grown from cell cultures into a layer of tissue supported by a coat shaped polymer layer. "Victimless Leather" was created as a sub-project of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, from the University of Western Australia and showcased at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artwork, a miniature jacket made from living mouse stem cells in an incubator, was designed to challenge perceptions of life and human responsibility toward manipulated living systems. This artistic grown garment is intended to confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and confronts notions of relationships with manipulated living systems. However, due to rapid cell growth, the exhibit was eventually "killed" by cutting off its nutrients, aligning with the creators' intent to remind viewers of the responsibility towards manipulated life.
Eat Just, Inc. is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, California, US. It develops and markets plant-based alternatives to conventionally produced egg products, as well as cultivated meat products. Eat Just was founded in 2011 by Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk. It raised about $120 million in early venture capital and became a unicorn in 2016 by surpassing a $1 billion valuation. It has been involved in several highly publicized disputes with traditional egg industry interests. In December 2020, its cultivated chicken meat became the first cultured meat to receive regulatory approval in Singapore. Shortly thereafter, Eat Just's cultured meat was sold to diners at the Singapore restaurant 1880, making it the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat".
Upside Foods is a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California, aiming to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti (CEO), Nicholas Genovese (CSO), and Will Clem. Valeti was a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture.
SuperMeat is an Israeli startup company working to develop a "meal-ready" chicken cultured meat product created through the use of cell culture.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Marcus Johannes "Mark" Post is a Dutch pharmacologist who is Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. On 5 August 2013, he was the first in the world to present a proof of concept for cultured meat. In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the ninth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era.
Mosa Meat is a Dutch food technology company, headquartered in Maastricht, Netherlands, creating production methods for cultured meat. It was founded in May 2016.
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna.
Aleph Farms is a cellular agriculture company active in the food technology space. It was co-founded in 2017 by the Israeli food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" of Strauss Group Ltd., and Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel.
Solar Foods is a producer of single cell protein founded in 2017. It focuses on using solar energy to produce food.
BioTech Foods is a Spanish biotechnology company dedicated to the development of cultured meat from the cultivation of muscle cells previously extracted from animals. It is a subsidiary of Brazilian company JBS S.A.
Believer Meats, from 2018 to 2022 known as Future Meat Technologies, or Future Meat for short, is a biotechnology firm which produces cultured meat from chicken cells and is working on cultured lamb kebabs and beef burgers. Based in Israel, its main office is located in Jerusalem, while its primary production facility is operating in Rehovot. Future Meat Technologies mainly seeks to supply hardware and cell lines to manufacturers of cultured meat rather than directly selling food products to consumers. In November 2022, Future Meat Technologies rebranded to Believer Meats.
Meatable is a Dutch biotechnology company aimed at cultured meat, particularly pork.
Bene Meat Technologies a.s. (BMT) is a Czech biotechnology start-up focused on research and development of technology for the production of cultivated meat on an industrial scale. It cooperates with scientific institutions and companies in the Czech Republic and abroad. The company has its laboratories on the first floor of the Cube building in Vokovice, Prague.