Changing the Food Game with George & Tim

Vow's mission is building a better food system with more delicious, sustainable, equitable and interesting options. They are resurrecting past culinary delights long forgotten by history via synthetic biology, and in essence, reinventing food from the ground up.

Tim and George are two scrappy founders who show anything is possible with the right drive and determination. If they are successful in their mission, Vow will become a cellular-agriculture powerhouse with many brands under their umbrella.

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Episode interviews: George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith, co founders of Vow, and Samantha Wong, partner at Blackbird.

Key topics covered:

1. The next agricultural revolution
2. Science meets automation behind Vow’s approach
3. Inside look into how Vow made a proof of concept with $60K instead of millions of dollars
4. The software principles helping Vow recreate a new category of food
5. Culture and leadership when working from a lab
6. Why farmers won’t be displaced from the next agricultural revolution

The best of Tim and George:

• “We've seen the ethical problems, environmental problems, and most recently the opportunity for viruses to jump from animal, to animal, to human and the huge consequences of global pandemics that come from animals.”
• “We're able to re-imagine what's possible and have exciting new flavours and totally different foods to what we've been producing using traditional agriculture.”
• What do we bring to this? It was that imagination. It was that idea that we don't have to think about this and the terms that our ancestors did. And we can start to build for a future where we don't associate animals and meat anymore.
• “10 years from now, if you walk into the supermarket or a restaurant, no matter which country you're in, you're going to have an option of eating cultured meat.”
• “Over time it’s going to become the dominant category because you have all of the advantages of animal products without any of the disadvantages of animal production.”
• “We were going out and acquiring biopsies by calling up farms and doing crazy stuff and almost getting in trouble with the law and the process.”
• “George and I self-funded that whole thing...for about $60,000 Australian dollars, we got to our first proof of concept. That's generally how much you would spend on one or two pieces of equipment in the lab.”
• “We wanted to prove that not only could you do it and it could be done, but also that two people with relatively basic science backgrounds could pick something up like that, leverage the incredible intelligence of people around them and just apply pure hustle and get it started.”
• “The cost of the inputs for cultured meat are going to drop precipitously and as they do the cost of manufacturing infrastructure will drop as well.”
• “We’re creating a house of brands that is driven by a product-market fit engine with human-centered design principles underlying that.”
• “We focus on building up individuals to be their best selves. It's creating the team that we dreamed of, and it's allowing the people on our team to grow and be so much better than they even imagined.”
• “We want a future where people see the unveiling of a new food in the same way that they think about an iPhone.”
• “We have an opportunity right now at the nexus of this next kind of agricultural revolution to be the country that supports that innovation. And so we have this really rich, massive, massive opportunity to increase the Australian GDP around this brand new technology.”

Samantha Wong on Vow: