What happens when a chef wanders off the line and into biotechnology? In George Peppou’s case, you get Vow, a company growing meat in a new way, not instead of animals, but with far fewer of them. Cultured meat starts with a tiny sample of animal cells, nurtured in a stainless-steel tank the way yeast is nurtured into bread or grapes into wine. Feed those cells well, let them multiply into muscle, fat and connective tissue, and in a matter of weeks you have meat without needing to raise whole flocks or herds. It opens questions most of us have never had to ask. What if meat could be produced with less land, less resource intensity, and a fraction of the animals? What if foie gras could be indulgent without the ethical weight? What if the future of meat is less about taking something away, and more about curiosity, flavour and abundance? George is chasing a future where meat is abundant, sustainable, and joy-giving. I wanted to know how he got here, what it all means, and what it looks like on the plate.
Conversation with a chef: It’s lovely to speak to you again. I met you at what was for me a very cinematic night in Melbourne in an art gallery with all the products laid out on a beautiful table, including those incredible tallow candles that you can dip your bread in and eat. To me, that was everything Melbourne should be. I found everything about it fascinating, and I wanted to find out a little bit more. Perhaps to start from the start, can you tell me what Vow is?
George Peppou: Absolutely. Vow is a cultured meat company. We’ve developed and introduced cultured meat as a category, where rather than growing meat by rearing and slaughtering animals, we grow animal cells outside of the animal in what looks a lot like brewery tanks, big stainless steel tanks where we feed the cells all the nutrients they need to grow and be healthy, and then we turn those into finished food products. This is very much not about replacing the meat we love. It’s about adding new things to meat eaters’ plates. I eat meat. I just had a chicken sandwich for lunch, and it’s been all about adding new options for people that really love meat.
So it’s not for vegans?
No, definitely not. We actually explicitly label not vegan or vegetarian. The whole goal is to make food for people who like eating meat can eat some of the time and really enjoy.
But it takes some pressure off ecosystems?
Exactly. If you look at the global demand for meat, from memory, it’s going to grow from 350 million tons a year to 390 million tons a year between 2020 and 2030. The additional 40 million tons a year that we require isn’t going to be coming from regenerative extensive agriculture systems. It’s going to be coming from very large-scale factory farms, mostly being built in Asia. I looked at it as, like, “Okay, well, if we can add something to the plate of meat eaters who eat meat some of the time, we can drastically reduce the need to add a very large number of factory farms with a very simple behaviour change of just choosing something a little bit different some of the time.
One of my questions was what problem did you feel most urgently compelled to solve, and you’ve just mentioned that. Where do you go from having that thought and observing what’s going on and looking at the projected figures and then thinking, “Okay, I’m going to reinvent the existing food system”?
Isn’t that how everyone would look at this? There were a lot of steps in this. It’s very easy to wrap your head around the macro problem of people like meat and we can’t make enough high-quality regenerative meat to feed everyone that wants to eat it. Once you’re there, it’s like, “Okay, well there’s a few different options.” What is the best way to make something that people who would otherwise be eating animal meat could eat some of the time? And to me, that came down to a question of what makes the sensory experience, what makes the nutritional profile of meat so distinctive and so satiating? And the answer, for better or for worse, is we don’t really know. It’s very complex. Then the question is, “Okay, well how do we get as close as possible to the complexity of animal meat in a production method that uses as little land and as little emissions as possible?” That’s what led me to cultured meat. You’re still going to love the animal biochemistry that you’d expect from whole animals. Then the question that follows that is, “Okay, well if you can make cultured meat, you’re not bound by the rules of what we can farm. What types of meats are going to get people like me, that love eating meat, excited to try it add to our diets?” And that’s where this whole notion of how do we create things that people that like meat choose selfishly some of the time. And Forged is all about this idea of exploration and discovery in a category where there’s just not that much new that you can try in animal products. There’s four animals that we eat in Australia, and there’s a handful of game animals you can get some of the time. But there’s just not much that’s new and distinctive and this ability to give people a truly new and novel experience is a very hard thing to find, especially as ingredients become more globalized and more widely available.
So then why Japanese quail?
We’ve grown a whole bunch of different things over the last six and a half years. I’m pretty sure I’ve tried more cultured cells than anyone on the planet. We’ve had everything from alpaca, kangaroo, crocodile, peacock, and dozens of others. What we were doing by building that cell library and searching through nature was figuring out what tastes good as cultured meat, but also trying to answer this question of what are we able to make in a volume and at a cost which makes sense for food and what’s the right balance of interesting versus accessible? Japanese quail was the first one that we really felt fit that. I think really most people, especially if they are foodies, have seen quail on the menu at some point in their life. People are aware it’s something which we eat. But if I asked you to precisely describe the flavour of quail, you’re probably going to have a harder time doing that than say for beef or chicken which are much more frequently consumed. So there’s a nice balance of familiar enough to not be super intimidating, but different enough to be interesting and kind of curious. Also it just tasted really good. It had that rich kind of umami meatiness to it, that little hint of gaminess, which made it a bit more interesting, a bit more sophisticated. When we were working with some chefs in Singapore in the early days, they would say, “Yeah, this is great. Can I have this now?” And we had to say, “Well, soon, but yes.”
One of the Forged product is the foie gras, or Forged Gras and that’s one that I think when you were saying earlier that sometimes people who love meat might selfishly choose to have a certain product, and I think that would be one of them in terms of the actual foie gras, because it really has got so many ethical problems around it, and yet it’s really delicious. Is that one of the reasons you made that particular product?
That wasn’t something we had actually planned on making. We were in Singapore. We were spending a lot of time with chefs and we were doing all these tastings, and it came up a lot, especially from some of the big hotels where they had introduced policies that required them to remove foie gras from the menu due to ethics. At the same time these chefs had guests coming in, especially for big events like weddings saying, “Hey, can I have foie gras?” And they’d have to say no. We heard this 50 times, and we thought, “Okay, we should probably make a foie gras now.” I think what was interesting about developing the quail Forged Gras as a concept was it really doesn’t appeal to people that eat foie gras. If you eat foie gras already, it’s a very specific experience. People that like the idea of the indulgence of foie gras but aren’t choosing to eat it for ethical or cost reasons as well. They’re the ones where we’ve seen the biggest uptake. In Singapore we’re doing a really fun Christmas special with Tiong Bahru Bakery, and they’ve a Forged Gras Gruyere twist on the menu. It’s selling ridiculously well, but mostly to young people who don’t have a lot of experience or any experience eating foie gras. That’s where we’ve seen that really strong uptake, of like people who would otherwise never have that in their diet are then able to have it once in a while and enjoy a really beautiful, indulgent experience.
Well, certainly I thought it was delicious, and I think I mentioned to you on the night, I’m a French teacher, and obviously a foodie. I thought it was so smooth and it had that umami to it. But you did say to me there were a couple of French people who were determined not to like it.
Oh, definitely. When you talk to people that have tried conventionally produced foie gras for the first time often their feedback is, “It was really intense,” and that offally, irony flavour which you do get in a really good foie gras, is quite off-putting unless you have grown up eating offal or foie gras. We designed our Forged Gras to quite intentionally be very mainstream, so it doesn’t have a lot of those more intense, acquired flavours that can be quite divisive. That has been quite a lot of fun.
Can cultured meat it have a terroir or a signature flavour? How far are you able to control the flavour profile?
Exquisitely, is the short answer. Something that I found really interesting, when I was working in kitchens, we would talk about flavour as terroir, and it’s about where it was grown and the season it was grown in and who the producer was. I had assumed that clever scientists could tell you, if you gave them a bottle of wine or a truffle or whatever, they could tell you about the molecules that make it taste like that. I thought we had the ability to decompose flavours and could say that we need this molecule to give it this experience. And it turns out that there’s so much ambiguity around how flavour works, and the only way you can really know is just tasting it. A lot of our development is we’ll just taste things and then we’ll tweak what we feed the cells, or when we’re harvesting them, or how we cook them, and then just taste again and describe the experience. It is a really weird contrast between the precise control over how we’re growing the cells, and then the only way to know if it tastes good is just to eat it. I just assumed there was a magic black box that could tell you what it would taste like. That doesn’t exist.
Long term what I’ve always looked towards is the idea that you can create protein and create meat where it doesn’t become a compromise between the sensory experience, how good it is for you to eat, and how expensive it is. I often half-jokingly say I really started Vow so that we can have something which you can just use like a beef mince, but it tastes like the best Wagyu beef mince you’ve ever bought, and has the nutritional profile of salmon and is the cheapest option on the shelf that’ll last eight weeks in the fridge. That would just make my life so easy. And the idea of being able to take food to a point where you get everything; all sides of the triangle all the time, that’s the thing I really hope that we’re able to build towards and hope we’re able to deliver for customers in Australia and around the world.
George Peppou, Vow
I’m interested in chefs and their journey. You trained in a professional kitchen before you pivoted into biology and tech. How much of your chef’s mindset still drives the decisions you make at Vow?
I wasn’t a very good chef, so not very much. I think a lot about the experience of how chefs will use products in the kitchen, so how do we package it, the size of packaging. We were doing a product, and the team had chosen a one-kilo or litre tub and I asked, “Aren’t they going to want to have this out on the pass, and shouldn’t it be a smaller tub so that way they can go through it quicker, and that way it’s fresher?” I try to think a lot about how things will perform, especially in a high-volume kitchen. I think the unexpected thing about having worked in a commercial kitchen, is that there are two things you are forced to be really good at. One is being able to quickly be prepared for a very intense thing to happen. Doing night after night of service and needing to have my prep done, my mise en place needs to be done, up on the pass, ready to go, otherwise, the first orders are going to hit and the whole night is going to fall apart and there’s no way to get back on top of it. Second is working those periods of very intense, short-term pressure and learning to love the adrenaline rush of it. You can really tell when someone’s been a chef just by the way that they prepare for something difficult, and how they think through that preparation and how they hold themselves during those times of stress and intensity. That’s the part that I feel like I’ve actually brought in more to this part of my life. There’s a reason why I’m not working in kitchens today, because I’m definitely not the best chef.
But as you say, chefs are great problem solvers, and have to pivot quite quickly. I’m going to speak to a couple of chefs who are using it. 1 Hotel is one of my favourite new hotels in Melbourne at the moment, and I am going to have a chat to their head chef, Josh, about their use of Forged by Vow. You are working on other things and opening up into different markets. It’s quite new here, but, you had been in Singapore for a while and I guess you’re just going to keep growing. Is that the goal?
That’s the goal. There’s Forged and then there’s everything else that we’re working on. Forged is all about really interesting experiences that you would find in a really nice restaurant or maybe a really high-end supermarket. We are now starting to think ahead about how to make cultured meat become part of a Tuesday night dinner. There’s been a bunch of stuff we’re working on which is much more every day and focused on that gain-of-function, gain-of-convenience. How do you give people meat which can be used in a, a very similar way or exactly the same way as meat that you use today, but it has, ideally, even better nutritional profile and longer shelf life, and is just a little bit easier to work with, and is soon hopefully cheaper? That’s what we’re thinking about next. How does this become something which you eat more like once or twice a week and it just becomes totally part of your routine?
For my final question, thinking about five-year plans, if we’re sitting down in 2030, so five years from, almost Christmas in 2030, what do you hope that Vow will have fundamentally changed?
That’s a really good question. I have been so focused on the next few months for so many years now. Long term what I’ve always looked towards is the idea that you can create protein and create meat where it doesn’t become a compromise between the sensory experience, how good it is for you to eat, and how expensive it is. I often half-jokingly say I really started Vow so that we can have something which you can just use like a beef mince, but it tastes like the best Wagyu beef mince you’ve ever bought, and has the nutritional profile of salmon and is the cheapest option on the shelf that’ll last eight weeks in the fridge. That would just make my life so easy. And the idea of being able to take food to a point where you get everything; all sides of the triangle all the time, that’s the thing I really hope that we’re able to build towards and hope we’re able to deliver for customers in Australia and around the world.
Coming soon, a chat with From Here by Mike at 1 Hotel’s head chef, Josh Bosen about how he uses the product.