BREAKING: Regulators approve cultivated meat sales in Australia
Asia Pacific just made history—again!
Earlier today (18 June 2025), Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) officially announced Australia’s first-ever approval of a cultivated meat product, opening up a potentially lucrative new market for the cellular agriculture sector and setting an important precedent for global regulators.
What exactly was approved?
Following a rigorous multi-year food safety assessment, FSANZ has given its blessing to cultivated quail, produced by Australian startup Vow through its premium brand Forged. This is the same ingredient that previously debuted in Singapore in early 2024 after the company received market approval from the Singapore Food Agency. Since its initial launch, Vow says that it has served over 25,000 servings of Forged products. In May, the company passed a production milestone by producing more than 538 kgs of Japanese quail in a single harvest.
Cultivated quail foie gras. Credit: Vow
FSANZ—a shared entity with jurisdiction over both Australia and New Zealand*—has been impressively transparent in its review process, publishing its assessment results, public consultation feedback, and other content online for all to see. This approach is expected to increase consumer confidence and establish a useful template for other countries to follow. As part of the approval, the agency has also developed some category-wide requirements and guidance for cultivated meat producers, in addition to approving Vow’s application—a step towards bringing cultivated meat more in line with the standardised requirements of conventional food categories.
Now that Vow has secured domestic market approval, the company plans to launch sales in “dozens of Australia’s most exciting venues,” including acclaimed Sydney restaurant NEL and Italian outpost Bottarga in Melbourne.
* Note: Although Australia and New Zealand share a food regulatory compliance system, they maintain separate biosecurity and import/export programmes.
How will this benefit Asia?
Global meat production is projected to increase by more than 50 percent by 2050 compared with 2012 levels, driven by a growing human population that is becoming more prosperous. Despite historically having lower total meat consumption than the West, Asia accounts for more than half of all protein consumption growth so far this century. As countries like Australia that have a well-established reputation for agricultural exports scale up cultivated meat development, it creates a significant opportunity for increased regional trade of secure and sustainable ‘future foods.’
Credit: Vow
“Sustainably satisfying rising meat demand will require scaling up additional forms of protein production that can complement the traditional farming methods Australia is renowned for,” says GFI APAC CEO Mirte Gosker. “Meat has never been more popular, especially in Asian markets that import top-quality proteins from down under. The challenge is that conventional production methods are highly inefficient: we currently feed up to 100 calories to a cow to produce just one calorie of beef.”
“Australia’s public embrace of cellular agriculture could enable local food producers to sell healthy and delicious cultivated proteins through existing agricultural distribution networks and add substantial new revenue streams to their ledgers. It also sets the stage for greater international regulatory harmonisation, which has the potential to unlock export opportunities across the world’s most populous region.”
Indeed, according to a report by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) titled Australia’s Protein Roadmap, the alternative protein sector is projected to contribute significantly to Australia’s $13 billion protein market opportunity by 2030 and generate approximately 9,860 jobs. This includes growth across cultivated, plant-based, and fermentation-derived proteins. In a conservative scenario, the industry is projected to reach $3 billion by 2030, while an ambitious scenario estimates growth to $9 billion.
Which country will be next?
As a globally respected regulatory body, FSANZ’s approval of cultivated quail is certain to boost confidence among its counterparts in other countries—most immediately in South Korea, which is expected to complete its first cultivated meat review this year. Other nations in various stages of cultivated meat exploration, including Thailand and Malaysia, will also no doubt be reassured by the fact that FSANZ has added its seal of approval to existing regulatory approvals in Singapore and the US.
One of the biggest spaces to watch is on global regulatory alignment—an area of work that GFI APAC has helped lead. At a recent meeting of the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius (“food code”) in Seoul, representatives from Singapore, China, the Republic of Korea, and Saudi Arabia agreed to form a working group to support further development and implementation of GFI-endorsed guidelines for food safety assessments of cell culture media for cultivated meat production, as a means of streamlining regulatory review processes.
GFI APAC Senior SciTech Analyst Dean Powell, Ph.D. (shown above) has also been selected to represent Australia in working groups run by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) intended to develop global standards for cultivated meat—a position of even greater significance now.
At GFI, we talk a lot about counterfactuals and catalysts (“If X happens, it could spur action on Y. Without Y, we cannot get to Z.”). Having an agricultural powerhouse like Australia join the growing coalition of countries that have cleared cultivated meat for sale is the kind of catalyst that will significantly expand the body of public regulatory data available to other nations and inevitably nudge some to sit up and pay attention in a way that they might not have otherwise.
In such situations, it’s easy to think of these cascading effects like dominoes, falling laterally one after another. But a more apt metaphor for creating an industry of this scale may be to imagine building a skyscraper from the ground up. Getting the first permits is often a years-long process, during which it looks like no progress is being made at all. But once those initial hurdles are cleared, the construction team can get to work laying a solid foundation. Soon, more help arrives to erect the scaffolding, pour concrete, and start laying bricks one by one. Many hands make light work. Before you know it, the electricians, plumbers, painters, and roofers are on site, as the full structure takes shape for the first time, rising steadily towards the stars.
Cheers,
Ryan Huling
Senior Writer | GFI APAC
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