Another cell-based meat company is poised to introduce its meat products into restaurants.
VowMorsel’s first product brand, which grew out of its cultured meat technology, will hit Singapore restaurants by the end of this year. Singapore was the first country to approve farm-raised meat products for sale, and Eat Just was one of the first companies to sell its lab-grown chicken there.
This milestone comes as the three-year-old Australian company, touting itself as ‘Australia’s first cell-based meat company’, has raised $49.2 million in Series A funding.
Cell-based technology is one of the solutions increasingly used to make meat from the cells of animals rather than the animals themselves. This is not only to save animals from slaughter, but also to provide a more sustainable way of food production.
Vow co-founder and CEO George Peppou told ukbusinessupdates.com that scaling and manufacturing are the company’s biggest single costs and a driver for chasing financing.
“Before the round, we had an underlying product and customers who were interested,” he said. “We had built Factory 1 and had everything in place for the regulatory process in Singapore, Australia and the US. However, there was much more demand than supply. If we could raise a big Series A, we could introduce Morsel to multiple markets and prove the big take on what the food looks like.”
Morsel is a farmed umami quail product, and the way cooks experiment with it is to put it on the menu, not as quail, but as a new kind of meat. It has a roasted umami flavor with aromatic seafood notes, providing a more unique experience and something you’d expect on a gourmet menu, Peppou said.
Blackbird and Prosperity7 Ventures, an Aramco Ventures growth fund, led the Series A along with Toyota Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Grok Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Peakbridge, Tenacious Ventures, HostPlus Super, NGS Super and Pavilion Capital.
The new capital comes almost two years after Vow took hold $6 million in seed capital. The company focused its technology on more exotic meats, such as buffalo, kangaroo or alpaca.
At the time, it also built a design facility and laboratory in Sydney, and in October announced the facility was open. When fully operational, the company said it will produce “a whopping 30 tons” or 66,100 pounds of cultured meat per year.
But as we’ve discussed many times in this publication, scale remains a challenge for cultured meat producers because of the cost of the materials and volume needed to achieve price parity with current meat products and the ultimate profitability of the business.
To put this in perspective, it is feared that as the human population approaches 9 billion by 2050However, a meat-centric diet will not provide enough calories to feed everyone. Both giant food producers and startups are collectively trying to find a way to produce more food, and plant-based has been identified as one of the ways to do this.
Currently, Vow’s Factory 1 is working to produce between one kilogram, or two pounds, and tens of kilograms every few days, Peppou said. He believes the company has a good strategy to achieve greater scale, and with the new capital, it will get its Morsel product to market faster, future product development and taking on new divisions, such as product and marketing.
Peppou expects to grow the production team from four to between 15 and 20 people in the coming months. By the middle of next year, Vow’s total workforce will be approximately 80 people.
It is also expanding production by beginning development on its second factory, which the company says will be “100x larger” than the first.
“Currently, every part of the process is a long way before the plant’s physical limits are reached, which is intentional,” he added. “We will continue to test with a high margin of error and then close to capacity, while also looking at what Factory 2 should look like.”
Singapore and Australia currently have a tailored approval process for cultured meat products and a clear regulatory framework for that approval, Peppou said. He expects to be able to get Morsel on the market in both countries within a year. However, the US is “a bit more ambiguous because there is no specific regulatory framework, so the timeline for introducing products is less clear,” Peppou added.
