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.”
This story is from the August 2022 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
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This story is from the August 2022 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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