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Spotted: Australian startup Vow is taking clean-meat to the next level by offering a greater variety of lab-grown products such as dumplings and tacos. Vow aims to provide a greater variety of meat without killing animals or compromising limited resources.

Currently, lab-grown meat is mostly limited to beef and more recently also chicken. Vow is taking lab-grown meat a step further by focusing on exotic animals that are largely inaccessible for general consumption. For example, the startup has created the world’s first dumpling made from cultivated kangaroo meat. However, their kangaroo meat is still to be approved for human consumption.

Vow aims to become the “Indiana Jones” of clean-meat, searching the globe for “unique textures, flavours and sensations, without the harm” the company says. 

Like other startups growing lab-based meat, Vow uses a process called “cellular agriculture”. For kangaroo meat, the process takes four weeks. The first step is to extract a sample of muscle tissue from the animal. Stem cells are then isolated and bathed in a nutrient-rich liquid. This encourages the cells to multiply, after which they will differentiate into the fibres that form muscle tissue.