We tried cultivated meat.
- WePlanet Australia
- Aug 11
- 3 min read
In April, 2025 Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) approved the first cultivated meat for sale in Australia.
What on earth is cultivated meat we hear you say. Let's back up a few steps. Animal agriculture is a major driver of deforestation and habitat loss in Australia and around the world. In Australia, more than half of our land area is used for grazing animals such as cattle and sheep.
It's also associated with the risk of zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that can jump from animals into human populations. Still unsure what that means? Think COVID-19. That little virus that shut down much of the world between 2020 and 2023.
Cultivated meat aims to reduce the environmental and health impacts associated with conventional meat production by producing real animal meat without needing to raise and slaughter an entire animal.
The process has some similarities to brewing beer. Animal cells are placed in a nutrient-rich environment inside a stainless steel vat, where they grow and multiply. Instead of brewing beer, however, you're growing the cells that make up meat.
In this case, it's quail.
Vow is an Australian cultivated meat company based in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Inside an otherwise unassuming facility, Vow grows cultivated quail cells in a stainless steel vat before using them to create foods such as quail foie gras and a smoky quail parfait spread.
Your next question is probably: so, what does it taste like? That was our question too, and we couldn't wait to try it once it became available. Follow our President, Andrea Leong, in these three short clips as she goes on an adventure to try Australia's first cell-cultured, or cultivated, meat in Sydney.
In September that year, we were fortunate enough to visit Vow's facilities in Sydney with some of our members. We got to taste the full range of their cultivated quail products.
Two of the members who attended have been vegan for years, one for more than 20 years, and their verdict was that it tasted too meaty for them to fully enjoy.
And honestly, the food was incredibly tasty and meaty. It was made even better knowing that it was produced without harming animals and with the potential to significantly reduce the environmental and health impacts associated with conventional meat production.
We were also incredibly proud to see an Australian company pioneering the future of food right here in Sydney.
With climate change increasing the risks from extreme weather, and diseases such as bird flu threatening our food systems, we need to make the way we produce food more resilient.
We don't have to look far to see why this matters.
Recent floods in Queensland and NSW have killed hundreds of thousands of cattle, sheep and other animals, while devastating bushfires in Victoria have killed tens of thousands more.
Disease presents another risk. During Australia's 2024 and 2025 bird flu outbreaks, authorities culled millions of chickens to contain the virus, including more than 10% of Australia's egg-laying flock. The result was something many Australians experienced firsthand: empty supermarket shelves, limits on how many cartons of eggs people could buy, and higher prices.
Behind these numbers are millions of animals that died or were killed, farmers who lost their livelihoods, and disruptions that flowed through our food system to the checkout and your household budget.
Innovative ways of producing the foods we love can help make our food system more resilient to these shocks, while reducing pressure on land and nature. Cultivated meat and precision fermentation won't replace conventional agriculture overnight, but they can give us more ways to produce food, helping secure our food supply, stabilise prices and allow both people and nature to thrive.
What we need now is for the public to embrace these new foods and for federal and state governments to support the innovative Australian companies developing them.
With the right support, Australian companies such as Magic Valley and Eden Brew, working on everything from cultivated lamb and beef to real dairy proteins produced without the need for a cow, can thrive right here in Australia.
Australia has an opportunity to pioneer the future of food, providing people with more sustainable choices while building a food system that is more resilient, abundant and better for the planet.