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Another cell-based meat company is set to introduce its meat products to restaurants.
Morsel, the first brand created from the cultured meat technology, will enter restaurants in Singapore later this year. Singapore was the first country to legalize the sale of meat products, with Just Eat being one of the first companies to sell lab-grown chicken there.
The three-year-old Australian company, which bills itself as “Australia’s first cell-based meat company”, has reached a milestone after raising $49.2 million in Series A funding.
One of the solutions is cell-based technology, which creates meat from animal cells instead of animals. This is not only to save animals from slaughter, but also to provide a more sustainable method of food production.
Vau co-founder and CEO George Peppu told TechCrunch that scale production and manufacturing are the company’s largest single expense and the driver behind funding.
“Before the round, we had interested products and customers,” he said. “We built Factory 1 and set up everything that goes into the regulatory process in Singapore, Australia and the US. But there was more demand than supply. If we can raise a large Series A, we can introduce Morsel to multiple markets and ensure a bigger vision of what the food looks like.”
Morsel is a product of trained umami quail, and the way chefs try to put it on the menu is not as quail, but as a new type of meat. It has a grilled umami flavor with aromatic seafood notes, which provides a more unique experience and something you’d expect to see on a fine dining menu, Pepow said.
Blackbird and Prosperity7 Ventures, Aramco Ventures’ growth fund, co-led the Series A and was joined by Toyota Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Grok Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Pickbridge, Junior Ventures, HostPlus Super, NGS Super and Pavilion Capital.
The new capital comes nearly two years after Vow raised $6 million in seed funding. The company focused its technology on exotic meats such as buffalo, kangaroo or alpaca.
At the time, it was building a design facility and laboratory in Sydney, and announced that the facility was open in October. When fully operational, the company says it will produce “up to 30 tons,” or 66,100 pounds, of ground beef annually.
But as we’ve discussed several times in this issue, scale continues to be a challenge for processed meat producers due to the cost of materials and volume needed to achieve cost parity with current meat products and, over time, company profitability.
Considering this, By 2050, with the human population approaching 9 billion, it is feared that a meat-based diet will not provide enough calories to feed everyone. Giant food producers and start-ups alike are trying to find ways to produce more food together, and a plant-based way has been identified.
Currently, Vow’s Factory 1 is producing a kilo or two pounds and tens of kilos every few days, Pepow said. The company believes that it has a good strategy to reach a large scale, and with the new capital Morcell will accelerate the marketing of its products, future product development and hiring in new departments such as production and marketing.
Peppow expects to grow his production team from four people to 15 or 20 people in the next few months. By the middle of next year, Wow’s total workforce will be around 80 people.
The company is expanding manufacturing by beginning development of a second factory that is “100x larger” than the first.
“Currently, each part of the process has a long way to go before hitting the physical limits of the factory, which is intentional,” he added. “We’ll continue to test with a high margin for error and then we’ll get closer to our capacity and see what Factory 2 should look like.”
Singapore and Australia currently have an approved process for traditional meat products and a clear regulatory framework for that approval, Peppu said. He expects to market Morsel in both countries within a year. The US, however, is “a bit more ambiguous because there is no specific regulatory framework and the timetable for introducing products is less clear,” Pepow added.
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