Start-up Vow opens one of the biggest cultured meat plants in the world following novel food dossier submission
Sydney-based company Vow has opened its first factory, which it says is one of the largest cultured meat plants in the southern hemisphere.
Situated in Alexandria, an inner-city suburb of Sydney, Vow’s Factory 1 has a 2,200L production capacity and is expected to produce up to 30 tonnes of cell-based meat a year.
The start-up said in a Twitter statement: “It’s a huge increase in scale, has required us to rethink so much of what we do to operate at much larger volumes and it’s just so thrilling to see the translation from the bench to factory scale.
“We also know it is the smallest factory we will ever operate.”
Alongside the opening of Factory 1, the company has also revealed it is in the process of developing Factory 2, which it predicts will be ready for operation in 2024. Expected to be even larger than their first plant, Vow hopes to be able to produce 100 times the amount of cultured meat at this site.
Founded in 2019 by George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, instead of aiming to replicate low cost, commodity meats like beef, pork, and chicken, the start-up is intent on using cultured meat technology to create new and improved proteins that industrial animal agriculture can’t. Its first product is set to be announced this year, and is currently awaiting regulatory approval.
If Vow receives approval, it hopes to launch the product in Singapore – the only country in the world so far that has green-lit the sale of cultured meat – by the end of the year.
Its product would first be launched in fine dining restaurants, Neel Reddy, Vow’s Business Operations Associate, revealed at the AltProteins 22 conference, held in Melbourne earlier this year. The company has said its protein is also under assessment for sale in another country, but has not specified the exact location.
Earlier this year, Eat Just announced it had started construction on a new 2.7 hectare space in Singapore’s Pioneer region to develop lab-grown meat products. Its cultured chicken meat is currently on sale in Singapore’s 1880 restaurant.
