Lab-Grown Foie Gras Is Now Available for Purchase
A lab-cultivated substitute for fatty duck liver presents a contentious outlook for the cultivated meat sector: as a luxury item for a select few.
LAST WEEK AT A HIGH-END sushi restaurant in New York, a small group of media and policy professionals dined on a selection of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. What set this menu apart was the unique ingredient present in the dishes—foie gras created from quail cells cultivated in a bioreactor. The gathering, provided by sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch event for the Australian cultivated meat company Vow, which will offer its foie gras at select restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The meal was luxurious—one dish included a heap of black truffle—but that was largely the intention. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are positioning cultivated meat as a high-end product—an atypical approach for an industry where numerous founders are driven by animal welfare and competing directly with large-scale meat production. Although producing meat in the lab is still incredibly costly, Peppou is attempting to leverage the technology’s greatest weakness to his benefit.
“I sense that the obituary for our industry has already been composed,” he states. “However, just because Californians are unable to do something doesn’t imply that it can’t be accomplished.”
That something is producing cultivated meat while generating a profit. The significant challenge confronting the industry—coupled with the prohibitions and the shortage of venture capital funding—is that cultivating animal cells in bioreactors is expensive. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, but one study using data from companies in 2021 estimated the price of cultivated meat to be between $68 and $10,000 per pound, based on different production techniques. Many startups claim to have significantly reduced production expenses since their initial trials, yet prices remain much higher than those of factory-farmed chicken, averaging about $2.67 per pound.
The two most well-funded startups in the sector—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have each launched cultivated chicken offerings. However, Peppou, who embraces his image in the industry as somewhat of a provocateur, claims that method doesn’t add up. “Cooking chicken was consistently a bad idea,” he states.
The basics of produced meat are expensive. The practice of cultivating animal cells outside their bodies typically falls under the purview of medical researchers and pharmaceutical firms. Cultured animal cells are utilized to produce vaccines and medications, which are marketed in small quantities at exorbitant prices. The cultivated meat sector requires many of the same components to develop the cells it aims to market as meat, but in contrast to the pharmaceutical industry, it must produce large quantities of cells and offer them at supermarket prices.
The primary expense at this moment is referred to as cell media—the liquid mixture of nutrients, amino acids, and growth factors provided to cells during their growth. The commercially available standard cell medium for cultivating stem cells is referred to as Essential 8, and its price starts at over $400 per liter. That’s acceptable if you’re a researcher cultivating a few cells in a petri dish, but producing just one kilogram of cultivated meat may demand several liters of media, rapidly escalating expenses. Companies producing cultivated meat must identify more affordable ingredient sources and purchase them in large quantities to reduce their expenses.
“Elliot Swartz, principal scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting alternative proteins, states that the industry must ultimately demonstrate its ability to scale.” Only a handful of essential components in cell media significantly contribute to rising expenses for cultivated meat businesses, many of which continue to function on a limited scale, generating kilograms of meat in each production cycle instead of the tons they aspire to achieve.
“My main worry consistently lies in scalability and the capacity to industrialize a product,” states Ido Savir, CEO of the Israeli cultivated meat firm SuperMeat. His firm has recently published a report predicting that—if manufactured in large quantities—it could generate chicken meat at $11.80 per pound, nearly matching the price for pasture-raised chicken in the United States. However, this presupposes production in bioreactors of up to 25,000 liters—many orders of magnitude greater than the 10-liter scale the company is presently operating at. “We’re getting better each month,” he states.
Savir aims for a significantly lower price compared to Peppou and seeks to collaborate with food manufacturers that could license his technology to incorporate cultivated meat into their product range. “We’re primarily focused on the mass market,” he states. The Dutch firm Meatable has expressed its intention to adopt a comparable strategy—licensing its technology to the select few companies that already generate a significant portion of the US’s meat. Other cultivated meat firms aim to market their products to consumers through their own brands while continuing to focus on the mainstream meat sector.
Peppou is clearly leaning in the contrary direction. He refuses to specify a price but mentions that his foie gras is priced at the “higher end” of the market—around several hundred dollars per pound. The foie gras consists of 51 percent cells from Japanese quails, which also contribute to the parfait Vow has been selling in Singapore since April, along with a blend of plant-derived fats and flavors from corn husks. “It’s either for a venue aiming to set itself apart with unique ingredients,” states Peppou, or for “big hotels or caterers that have taken foie gras off their menus because of concerns over cruelty.”
Traditional foie gras is produced by forcibly feeding ducks or geese until their livers become enlarged with fat. Production is prohibited in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and California, among other locations. Another cultivated meat company, Gourmey, which is based in France, also produces foie gras, although its product is not available for purchase at this time.
Vow’s quail parfait is featured on the menu at approximately six restaurants in Singapore, offered as a $20 SGD ($15) bar snack and included in a $250 SGD tasting menu. In Peppou’s account, opting for high-end options serves to frame the elevated expenses and limited production of cultivated meat as a luxury offer. “I think the greatest challenge we face is how to influence consumer attitudes towards this category.” In my opinion, the most effective approach is to be present in the most impactful locations with the relatively small amount of resources we possess.
SuperMeat’s Savir mentions that premium cultivated meat items “are relevant,” but he is primarily focused on the mass market, where he can enhance existing meat production. This will entail maintaining efforts to reduce production expenses further. One possibility is to combine cultivated meat with significantly less expensive plant-derived components. Savir states that their target products consist of approximately 30 percent cultivated meat cells and 70 percent plant-derived components. Numerous other companies are adopting a comparable approach. In Singapore, Eat Just offers cultivated chicken strips composed of merely 3 percent chicken cells.
The sector is also optimistic that consumers will be willing to pay higher prices due to the possible environmental advantages of producing meat without using animals. Savir mentions that he has communicated with a “very large” pizza company, which claims that substituting merely 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultivated chicken would significantly reduce its carbon footprint.
Even substituting a small fraction of a percent of the $50 billion broiler chicken sector in the US would necessitate a massive increase in cultivated meat manufacturing. “If you are up against chicken, the most affordable meat option, you must either scale up significantly or develop hybrid products with reduced inclusion rates,” states Swartz from the Good Food Institute. However, as investor funding is limited, companies must think outside the box regarding how they intend to introduce products to the market and reach many founders’ ultimate aim of replacing a portion of traditional meat production.
Although he aims for the luxury market, Peppou states he still isn’t making a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margins are significantly improved compared to competing with factory-farmed chicken. “If you observe many deep tech firms, it’s somewhat a matter of simply surviving,” he states. “And it’s about finding ways to survive long enough to improve sufficiently to succeed in a market that likely hasn’t been established yet.”
This suggests that Vow’s future path may not appear significantly different from those of other cultivated meat businesses. “The quantities will be limited, primarily found in restaurants.” “Swartz states that they will be refining these products gradually before making any kind of entry into the mass market.” “In the near future, I am eager to see more individuals who are exploring this for the first time, not out of excitement for cultivated meat, but simply due to their curiosity.”
