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An Australian startup is hoping to win over adventurous foodies and ease its cell-cultured paté into the mainstream.
Can lab-grown foie gras find a niche in the luxury food market?
Makers of lab-grown aka cell-cultured meat have pitched the product as a fix for our food chain’s environmental and humanitarian issues. But it comes with its own baggage—it is expensive to produce, it can’t nail the protein’s texture and it starts “life” as sludge.
This technology has run up against the same kind of problems that have stymied all kinds of alternative meats, whether made in a lab or created from vegetables. After bursting onto the market in the late 2010s, plant-based stars such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat had a momentary rise but have since struggled, as high costs, texture issues and consumer skepticism stalled widespread adoption.
The Australia-based startup Vow is betting it can circumvent some of these problems with a niche meant to appeal to adventurous foodies: faux foie gras.
Unlike cultured chicken, which would have to be cheap enough to compete at grocery stores, Vow’s so-called Forged Gras competes only against a pricey upmarket delicacy. You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of PETA to have concerns about the force-feeding of geese and ducks, which is traditionally applied to achieve that buttery liver—a practice banned in some locales.
Vow’s product is made from cultured quail cells that, when combined with aromatics and other ingredients, can evoke the flavor of the real thing.
To start, Vow is easing its product into the mainstream via high-end dining before scaling up for mass production.
“Vow’s entire ethos as a company is making things that are deliberately different from the meats that we consume today,” said Ellen Dinsmoor, chief operating officer. “Foie gras hits that area and hits our go-to-market approach, which is starting in a more premium, high-end setting and then coming down market.”
Two Men Bagel House in Singapore features Vow’s Forged Gras on the Foie King bagel, which sells for about $14.
The company’s faux foie gras is getting started in Singapore, where more than 35 venues serve the delicacy. Vow recently expanded into Australia, where it just won approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the agency that regulates food and food safety.
At Hotel Lincoln in the Melbourne, Australia, area, Vow’s foie gras is served with parsley root, quince cracker, caper rémoulade and black-garlic puree for the equivalent of $19. For comparison, a foie gras terrine at Blue Ribbon Brasserie in New York City goes for $36.
Still, before Forged Gras becomes available on grocery shelves, Vow must scale its manufacturing and navigate a complicated regulatory and political landscape.
Vow began conducting its own taste tests over six years ago when trying to decide which animal cells would make the most delicious meat products.
When exploring a new cell line, Vow is “looking for the aroma, how it feels when you put it in your mouth, what happens when you chew it,” Dinsmoor said. “We’re baking it, we’re sous-videing it, we’re seeing how flexible as an ingredient it is.”
Vow landed on Japanese quail after testing dozens of species, Dinsmoor said. “It’s familiar in the way that poultry is, but it has some really nice umami, slightly gamy notes that I think is different,” she added.
Vow begins production by taking a biopsy from a Japanese quail to extract a connective-tissue cell, which the team found best replicated the rich, fatty texture of liver.
Once the cells have multiplied in a confined container, workers put them inside a 200-liter tank similar to a brewery vat, along with a nutrient broth. As the cells grow, they are transferred to larger tanks, eventually reaching a vessel that holds 20,000 liters.
When it is time to “harvest,” workers skim the cells—“like the whey in cheese-making,” Dinsmoor said——and move them into Vow’s food-production zone, where they are cooked with culinary ingredients. The faux fatty liver’s ingredients include fava bean protein, various fruit and vegetable concentrates and carrageenan, a thickening agent. The paté contains butter and spices such as salt and thyme.
Vow uses tanks in Sydney to grow its animal-cell cultures.
Because Vow cultivates specific connective-tissue cells that contain both protein and fat, the cultured foie gras product develops a fatty, tender texture that resembles the creamy softness of real foie gras. Unlike its competitors, Vow doesn’t need to match the sinewy, crispy feel of a cultured chicken nugget, which is more difficult for a product that begins as liquidy sludge.
The company tests the cultivated cells for safety before using them. Cultured meat is especially vulnerable to contamination during production because the cells lack an immune system. Dinsmoor said tainted batches are easy to spot. Contaminated cells die quickly and are discarded.
Producing cultured meat does come at a hefty price. Vow says it pays $85 a kilogram to harvest its quail cells——and that is before processing them into sliced meat or paté, where the cell culture accounts for 51% and 60% of the product, respectively. The average cost to produce mainstream beef in the U.S. is under $10 a kilogram, and for highly processed items such as ground beef, chicken nuggets or hot dogs, production costs typically fall below $5 a kilogram, according to Jennifer Martin, associate professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, who isn’t involved with Vow.
Expanding to commercial scale would require major additional investment, which is why it remains wise for Vow to stay in restaurants for now, according to Martin.
“The labor, the cell culture, the multi-hundred-thousand dollar incubators—those are large capital expenses,” said Martin. “It’s a big risk if you say we’re putting billions of dollars into scaling a product whose market share is still a fraction of the traditional meat protein.”
Cultivated chicken from Good Meat, authorized by the U.S. Agriculture Department in 2023.
Florida and Alabama banned the sale and production of cultured meat in 2024, with several other states following so far in 2025. The wave of restrictions began after the U.S. Agriculture Department granted approval in mid-2023 to Upside Foods and Good Meat, which also produce cell-cultivated meat products, though both remain sparsely available in the U.S.
Lawmakers backing the bans have cited concerns about cultured meat’s health implications—although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said such approved products are safe for consumption—and framed the measures as a way to protect the livelihoods of American farmers and cattle ranchers.
“If the day ever comes that we allow the sale of these lab-grown products, they need to be properly labeled so people know exactly what they’re buying,” said Rep. Dean Black, a Republican member of the Florida Legislature and vocal supporter of the ban.
Vow said it plans to file for FDA approval in coming months, but Dinsmoor said U.S. regulatory challenges could ultimately make the company give priority to growth in other parts of Asia and the European Union, where the path appears more politically viable.
Write to Ben Raab at ben.raab@wsj.com and Wilson Rothman at wilson.rothman@wsj.com
