Vow's Cultivated Quail Goes on Sale in Hong Kong, a First for the City

Cultivated meat has gone on sale in Hong Kong for the first time, with Australian start-up Vow launching a foie gras made from quail cells at one of the city's best-known hotels.

Vow's Forged Gras is going on the menu this month at The Aubrey, an izakaya inside the Mandarin Oriental, Green Queen reports, and vegconomist calls it the first commercial sale of cultivated meat in the region. The Sydney company is the first cultivated meat business to satisfy the safety requirements of Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety. That clearance rests on the approval Vow won from the Singapore Food Agency in March, which confirmed its products meet the centre's standards. So this isn't a separate Hong Kong approval, but it does mean diners in the city can now order cultivated meat.

It also makes Vow the first company to sell multiple cultivated meat products in multiple markets, after it launched a cultured quail parfait in Singapore six months ago.

Vow's founder and CEO George Peppou said:

The launch of Forged Gras continues our mission to bring scarce or never-before-seen foods to millions, but does so in a way that seeks to innovate, not imitate.

We aim to create something entirely new, unconstrained by the tradition of even the oldest delicacies.

He told Green Queen the company took a different path from the rest of the cultured meat industry, which he says has leaned on pharmaceutical manufacturing platforms that are far too expensive for food production, and he puts Vow's success down to a few factors unique to the company. One of those is scale. Vow's first factory can produce 30 tonnes of protein a year, and a second is in development with 100 times the capacity. The company has got this far on $56 million of investment, and Peppou says Australia's food regulator FSANZ has opened a second round of public consultation, with a decision expected in the first quarter of 2025.

It isn't vegan, of course, since it starts from animal cells. But it's hard not to cheer a foie gras that doesn't need a single duck or goose. Traditional foie gras is made by force-feeding birds to fatten their livers, which is why it's already banned from production in the UK and many other countries. Here the quail cells are simply grown in a tank, with no force-feeding at all.

And for anyone wondering whether a plant-based diet would do the job just as well, the answer is yes. An Oxford study in Nature Food found a vegan diet cuts climate impact by 75% compared with high meat eaters. Cultivated meat is for the people who aren't there yet, and that's still a lot of people.

This follows Israel approving the world's first cultivated beef earlier this year and the Bezos Earth Fund pledging $60 million to sustainable protein research. We've followed this since Singapore became the first country to approve lab-grown chicken, and then the US approved lab-grown chicken for sale.

Fancy dining, minus the cruelty. The future is looking brighter.