In June 2025, Vow told the press what it expected to be producing by the end of that year: “By the end of the year, Vow expects to reach a production capability of up to 900 kg per harvest, scaling to 10,800 kg monthly or 130,000 kg annually.”
By June 2026 it had comfortably beaten that. Reporting from that month states: “Currently, it is producing over 5,000 kg of cultivated meat per week” — more than 20,000kg a month on our arithmetic, roughly double the target it had set a year earlier. Its largest single harvest had gone from 538kg in May 2025 to 1,500kg.
In the same month, Vow cut jobs for the second time in eighteen months, replaced its co-founder chief executive, and confirmed it had shifted away from producing its own finished foods.
That combination is the most instructive thing to happen in cultivated meat this year. Every post-mortem in this sector — including ours on Believer Meats — concludes that manufacturing cost and scale were the binding constraint. Vow is the first company to substantially relieve that constraint and then restructure anyway.
What FSANZ actually approved
The approval itself is worth recording precisely, because it is more consequential than a single company’s product clearance.
Application A1269, Cultured Quail as a Novel Food, was submitted by Vow Group Pty Ltd. FSANZ approved it on 27 March 2025, issued its approval report on 7 April 2025, and following the ministerial review period the Code changes were gazetted: “On 18 June 2025, changes to the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code (the Code) were gazetted to permit the use of cell-cultured quail as a food.”
What was created alongside it matters more than the quail:
| Instrument | What it does |
|---|---|
| New Standard 1.5.4 | Labelling requirements, including use of the term “cell-cultured” or “cell-cultivated” |
| New Standard 3.4.1 | Food safety requirements for cell-cultured food production |
| Schedule 25A | A list of permitted cell-cultured foods — cultured quail is the first entry |
| Schedule 27 (amended) | Microbiological limits, including for Salmonella spp. and Listeria monocytogenes |
This is a regulatory pathway, not a one-off permission. Vow’s product occupies the first line of a schedule built to hold others. The approval also came with a scope limit worth knowing: FSANZ confirmed Vow had not requested that its cultured quail be sold as a single retail ingredient — it is to be combined with other ingredients — and that inclusion in special purpose foods such as sports foods or infant formula would require further assessment.
Practical consequence: for anyone sequencing launch markets, Australia and New Zealand moved in one step from having no cell-cultured framework to having a complete one with a populated schedule. That is a materially different proposition from the position in Great Britain, where Vow is a sandbox participant and no cell-cultivated product has been authorised for human consumption at all.
The production record
| Date | Figure | Achieved or target |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | ~907kg (2,000 lb) of quail per month | Achieved, before Andromeda was fully online |
| Dec 2024 | 20,000-litre bioreactor “Andromeda” installed at the Sydney facility | Achieved (installation) |
| Jan 2025 | Andromeda described by the chief executive as operating | Achieved |
| May 2025 | 538kg single harvest, described as the largest in history at the time | Achieved |
| Jun 2025 | 35,000 litres total cell cultivation capacity across the second factory | Achieved |
| Jun 2025 | Up to 900kg per harvest, 10,800kg monthly, 130,000kg annually by end-2025 | Target |
| Jun 2026 | 1,500kg single harvest | Achieved |
| Jun 2026 | Over 5,000kg per week | Achieved |
The distinction between the two kinds of row is the one thing this sector’s coverage most consistently loses. The 10,800kg monthly figure has been quoted repeatedly as though it were Vow’s output; it was a forecast, and the actual outcome exceeded it.
Vow also claims its second factory was “20 to 50 times cheaper to build than competitors” — an unaudited company claim, but a specific one, and consistent with the direction of the equipment cost disclosures emerging elsewhere in cultivated meat.
One figure did not stay still. Andromeda is described as 20,000 litres in 2024 and 2025 reporting and as 22,000 litres from 2026 onward, always with the same “largest food-grade cell culture bioreactor” superlative. No source we fetched explains whether this is the same vessel restated or a genuine upgrade.
Note also what the superlative claims and does not claim. It is consistently qualified as the largest food-grade cell culture bioreactor. Larger vessels exist in biopharma, and larger food ones have been announced by others without confirmation that they were built.
The commercial record
Singapore came first: SFA approval in March 2024, debut at the Mandala Club on 12 April 2024. In August 2025, Vow’s chief operating officer Ellen Dinsmoor said “Forged has become a staple in some of Singapore’s most forward-thinking restaurants”, and put the total at more than 25,000 dishes served since April 2024 — roughly sixteen months.
Australia followed the June 2025 gazettal. Vow debuted in July 2025 across restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, and in October 2025 launched three direct-to-consumer products:
| Product | Cultivated content | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Hickory-smoked quail spread | 40% cultivated meat | A$14.99 per 180g jar |
| Foie gras | 51% of the lobe | $25 for five, $50 for ten |
| Frozen croquettes | 30% cultured quail parfait | $30 for a case of 20, $60 for 40 |
Currency is stated explicitly as Australian dollars only for the first item; the others are unmarked in the source and appear from context to be the same.
The two numbers cannot be reconciled, and that is the finding
Vow publishes production in kilograms and sales in dishes. No serving size is published anywhere we looked. The 25,000-dish figure is Singapore-only and covers April 2024 to August 2025; the 5,000kg-per-week figure is company-wide and dated June 2026. There is no disclosed Australia-inclusive sales figure at all.
So the most obvious question an investor or a supplier would ask — how much of what is being made is being sold — cannot be answered from public information, even for the most transparent company in the category.
This is the fourth consecutive piece in which we have run into the same shape of problem: cost models with no comparable basis, tonnages with no stated moisture basis, capacity in four incompatible units, and now output and sales in units that do not convert. The recurring failure in alternative protein disclosure is not dishonesty. It is that nobody states the basis.
Practical consequence: when a cultivated meat company quotes a sales figure, ask for the unit, the geography and the period before comparing it to anything. Three of those four are usually missing.
The pivot
January 2025. Vow laid off 25 employees, around 30% of its workforce, across R&D, sales and communications, while finalising a funding round and citing slow regulatory approval processes. Co-founder George Peppou framed it as “a decision we are taking from a position of strength as the industry leader, not a position of weakness”.
May 2026. More roles went, this time attached to an explicit change of business model. Peppou: “Earlier this year, we shifted from in-house food production to co-manufacturing for finished foods, and a small number of roles were impacted.”
June 2026. Alex Andrews, who had joined as chief of staff in January 2026, became chief executive. Peppou moved to an executive director role and confirmed that “I and a small team have spun out to a new company” applying the cell-culture technology outside food. Andrews’ mandate, in Peppou’s description, is to grow multiple new verticals and to provide contract manufacturing to cultured meat companies globally.
Read against the production table, the sequence is unambiguous. Output roughly doubled past target while the company twice concluded it had more people and more consumer-facing operations than its business could support. Manufacturing capability improved; the plan for what to do with it changed.
What the Parima run demonstrates
The clearest evidence for where this goes came on 2 July 2026. Parima, Green Queen reported, “has demonstrated production of its cell-cultured duck at a tonne-scale volume in a single run on fellow cultivated meat pioneer Vow’s 22,000-litre production line, which is the largest food-grade cell culture bioreactor globally.”
Parima is the merged Gourmey and Vital Meat — the same two companies whose applications are the two validated dossiers in the UK sandbox. It retains its own cell lines and brands, and buys capacity. Co-founder Nicolas Morin-Forest described the model directly: “We manufacture in-house in France at up to 2,000-litre scale, which covers meaningful volumes. For larger commercial scale, our model relies on the best manufacturing partners, such as Vow”.
The reported cost outcome is dramatic and should be read carefully: Parima achieved the run at a 99% lower cost than its earlier runs, attributed to successive gains in cell culture yields and to the volume efficiencies of operating at scale. That is a reduction against its own prior small-scale cost base, not against any industry benchmark.
There is, unusually, an absolute figure attached — and it is one of the few public cost numbers in cultivated meat. Analysis by Arthur D. Little cited in the same report puts a finished-product cost in the low €40s per kilogram in 2026, with what it calls a “credible path” to roughly €10 per kilogram by the end of the decade, a 75% reduction. Reported cell densities span 55–100g per litre.
Treat the €40s figure as the useful one and the €10 figure as a projection by an interested party. But a named consultancy putting a per-kilogram number on cultivated meat production in 2026 is a meaningful break from a sector that has mostly declined to publish one.
Peppou’s framing of what the collaboration proves is the honest version: “Our platform has proven that cultivated cell production at 22,000 litres works at unit economics the industry can build on. What this collaboration adds is the demonstration that the economics Vow has already achieved work for partners too.”
This is the picks-and-shovels thesis appearing organically, from a company that started as a brand. It is worth noting we have tested that thesis before and found it wanting — two input-layer suppliers failed on the same clock as the developers they served. The difference here is that Vow’s supply business is a by-product of a working plant rather than a standalone bet on one.
The counter-argument
The optimistic reading is straightforward and probably correct in part.
A company that builds the largest food-grade cell-culture line in the world and then rents it out is doing something rational, not something desperate. Capacity utilisation is the single biggest determinant of unit cost in any fermentation or cell-culture process; a plant running one company’s product at partial utilisation is expensive per kilogram, and the same plant running three companies’ products is not. Turning a cost centre into a revenue line is what a well-run manufacturer does.
The layoffs also have a mundane explanation. Consumer food operations — sales, marketing, brand, distribution — are staff-intensive and slow to pay back. Moving finished-food production to co-manufacturers and cutting the associated roles is a legitimate focus decision, and Peppou’s “position of strength” framing, while self-serving, is not obviously false against a doubling of output.
The pessimistic reading is that a company does not usually exit consumer food while its consumer food is selling well, and that we have no sales figure for Australia to test it against. Both readings are available on the published evidence. What is not available is a reading in which production capability was the limiting factor, because the production numbers went the right way throughout.
What we could not establish
- Whether the January 2025 funding round closed, and if so its size, date and investors. Total raised is consistently reported as $55M, essentially all of it from the $49.8M Series A announced in November 2022. One 2024 source says $56M.
- Any Vow revenue figure, or any sales figure that includes Australia.
- A serving size for the 25,000-dish figure, which is why it cannot be reconciled with the production figures.
- Whether the 20,000-litre and 22,000-litre bioreactor figures describe the same vessel.
- Financial terms of the Vow–Parima manufacturing arrangement.
- The vertical of Peppou’s spinout. It is described only as outside food.
- The currency of the “less than $50 a pound for raw cell slurry” figure reported in December 2024. The publication is US-based, so USD is the reasonable assumption, but the source does not state it. That figure is also for raw cell slurry, not finished product, and is not a cost per kilogram of anything sold.
- The 20-to-50-times-cheaper factory construction claim, which is Vow’s own and unaudited.
What to watch
- Whether any Australia sales figure is published. It is the missing variable in every reading of this story, and the one the company is best placed to supply.
- Whether the contract manufacturing line becomes a disclosed revenue segment. If Vow is genuinely becoming the sector’s merchant capacity, that will show up as customers and contracts, not as press releases about harvests.
- Whether other developers follow Parima onto Vow’s line. One customer is a demonstration; three is an industry structure. This is the closest thing cultivated meat has to the CDMO layer that fermentation has been waiting on for years.
- What the new verticals turn out to be. A cell-culture platform with proven 22,000-litre operation has applications well outside food, and Peppou has already left to pursue one of them. If the highest-value use of the largest food-grade bioreactor in the world turns out not to be food, that is a finding about this industry, not about this company.