Cultured Shelves, Performative Pantries

Get Caught Up: Forged, a Vow brand and category-leader, was one of the first in the world to sell cultured meat. I joined just after they launched into Singapore in 2024, where top chefs and restaurants (like Fura’s Christina Rasmussen and Somma’s Mirko Febbrile), picked up our “new, deliberately different, and sustainable” meats quickly.

Before launching into Sydney in 2025, we had two product launches make waves: internationally, with the world’s first ethical foie gras, and locally with our edible tallow candles. When cultured meat was approved for sale in Australia, June 2025, we wasted no time in launching Forged into Australia in July. We moved quickly from fine-dining restaurants to casual premium eateries, then a cooler bag to your home, and now finally sit on store shelves.

The road to stocking cultured meat in supermarkets, like many in Australia, was a long one. Seeing people eat Forged and cultured meat in fine dining restaurants in Singapore and Sydney was surreal… but we wanted to see it on-shelf. One year after launching into Australia, we hit the shelves: meaning packaging that could survive retail, on a budget that made sense.

We put Forged on small Sydney grocers’ shelves and cut packaging cost by 73% in the process. Not too shabby. Pushing to lose our old vessel, a glass jar, in favour of tamper-proof plastic tubs, saved us the most bucks… so we spent it on a custom die-cut sleeve.

Affording us the real estate we just didn’t have with a label on glass, my hand-drawn illustrations lived there to push a once overly refined, B2B brand towards something that pulls the eye. Plus, for a novel and new food, a product explainer never goes awry. So battling for space on the curated shopping shelf, I gave Forged permission to go a bit wild… if we can gentrify olive oil, why not the cultured and cured meat section?