Vow’s quail parfait is on the menu at about six restaurants in Singapore, including being sold as a snack for SGD 20 ($15) and as part of a tasting menu for SGD 250. According to Peppou, the move to high-end is a way to turn cultured meat’s high costs and low production volumes into a luxury offering. “I believe the biggest challenge we face is how to shape consumer sentiment around this category. And the most effective way to do that, I think, is to be in the most influential places with the relatively limited volume that we have.”
SuperMeat’s Savir says luxury cultured meat products “have a place”, but he is more interested in the mass market, where it can complement current meat production. This will mean continuing to reduce production costs. One possibility is mixing cultured meat with much cheaper plant-based ingredients. Savir says they aim for products that are about 30 percent cultured meat cells and 70 percent plant ingredients. Several other firms are taking a similar strategy. In Singapore, Eat Just sells cultured chicken strips that are only 3 percent chicken cells.
The industry also hopes that customers will pay premium prices because of the potential environmental benefits of producing meat outside of animal bodies. Savir says he’s talked to a “very large” pizza company that says replacing just 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultured chicken would result in a significant drop in its carbon footprint.
Even replacing a fraction of a percent of the $50 billion U.S. broiler industry would require a monumental increase in cultured meat production. “If you’re competing with chicken, which is the cheapest meat product, then you either have to go very large scale or create hybrid products that have lower levels of inclusion,” says Swartz of the Good Food Institute. But with investor dollars in short supply, companies must get creative about how they plan to get products out into the world and achieve the ultimate goal of many founders to displace at least some of conventional meat production.
Despite targeting the luxury market, Peppou says he is yet to turn a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margin is much better than it would be if he were competing with factory-raised chicken. “If you look at a lot of deep tech companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying,” he says. “And figuring out ways to not die long enough to get good enough to win in a market that probably doesn’t exist yet.”
That means the route ahead for Vow may not look entirely different from other cultured meat companies. “Volumes will be low, mostly in restaurants. They will iterate on these products over time before they get some kind of entry point to the mass market,” says Swartz. “In the short term, what I’m looking forward to is getting more people who are trying this for the first time, not because they’re excited about cultured meat, but in general because they’re interested.”
Updated 19-11-2024 21:00 GMT: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Vow’s cultured foie gras contained 70 percent quail cells.
