Dish up a treat from the lab

Peppou’s first invention as a kid was an expanding measuring stick so that his grandfather could gauge the distance between lawn bowling balls. His attitude to life is to be curious and pathologically optimistic. He cured his fear of heights by taking a mountaineering holiday in France. He would like to learn welding. His best advice came from a mentor, Sarah, who said he either had to become a business founder or shut up rather than be indecisive. Describes his work life balance as poor, being at work most days.

- ALAN DEANS

Fact file

George Peppou

Co-founder and CEO of tech start-up Vow Food, which is making cultured meat in the laboratory. Age 31; lives in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern.

Shiny stainless-steel vats and pipes are busily being installed alongside control panels, a glass-fronted laboratory and a loading dock. There doesn’t seem to be much room to squeeze them in.

It’s a Saturday morning and there is a high sense of anticipation as George Peppou and his team assemble the first production line for the sustainable, cultured meat plant being built by his start-up, Vow.

For some years Peppou has been working on how the food businesses can be more sustainable by eliminating farming while also feeding the world’s growing population. By fermenting meat in tanks, Peppou and his well-heeled financial backers, Square Peg, Blackbird, Grok Ventures and Tenacious Ventures, reckon they can make tasty plates fit for the tables of Michelin star chefs.

“Meat is something we don’t really understand,” says Peppou. “There’s a lot of mystery around it. We know it’s very complex. We know there are hundreds of molecules that interact with our tastebuds to give us a love for meat. But we don’t really know what they are and how they work together.

“Plants can’t be turned into a product like that. Using precision fermentation, however, you can mix together hundreds of different molecules. It is very complex and expensive, but you can make animal tissue without the animal.”