CNN
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In what’s been called a world first, consumers in the UK are now able to buy a pet treat made with lab-grown meat.
The treat contains plant-based ingredients and 4% chicken meat cultivated in a lab by Meatly, a London-based startup that last year became the first company in the world to get regulatory approval for this type of meat to be used in pet food.
Lab-grown or cultivated meat is made by harvesting a tiny sample of animals cells — from a chicken egg, in this case — and then culturing them in a steel tank called a bioreactor, along with water and nutrients. In a few weeks, a protein mass is produced with a much smaller environmental impact than growing a live animal, in terms of land and water use, as well as carbon emissions — and without having to kill an actual chicken.
“It’s the first time ever a consumer has been able to buy a product made from cultivated meat for their pet, and it’s the first time in Europe that a consumer has been able to buy cultivated meat full stop, whether for humans or animals,” says Owen Ensor, who founded Meatly in 2022.
“Our intention was always to do cultivated meat for pet food. We recognized that there was a huge burning need in the pet world, with 20% of meat globally being eaten by our pets. The average Labrador eats more meat than its owner,” he added.
For now, the treat — called “Chick Bites” and produced in collaboration with pet food brand The Pack — is in limited release and only available in one London outlet of Pets at Home, a chain that operates 457 stores in the UK and was an early investor in Meatly. It costs £3.49 ($4.30) for 50 grams.
A rare treat
In recent years, meat alternatives have been growing in popularity, but unlike plant-based products, which use protein such as soy or peas to mimic real meat, and products that use the fermentation of microbes like fungi or yeasts to make the protein, cultivated meat is not yet widely available.
Only a handful of countries have approved the sale of lab-grown meat, including Singapore, in 2020, the United States, in 2023, and Israel in 2024. However, two US states — Florida and Alabama — have since banned cultivated meat, and none is currently available for sale in the country. In 2023, Italy became the first country to ban the sale of lab-grown meat, although the measure has since been challenged by the European Union.
Beyond the issues of regulatory approval and consumer acceptance, cultivated meat is still very expensive to make. “Currently we’re about £30 (about $37) per kilogram of the chicken that we’re producing, and we’d want to be between £5 and £10 (between $6.20 and $12.40),” says Ensor. “Our process is still quite expensive, but we’ve made incredible progress bringing the cost down, particularly of the nutrients we are feeding the chicken cells with. Those are often the most expensive component, and we’ve brought those down from what has been £700 (about $867) per liter to what is currently 26 pence per liter (about 32 cents). We have made this more cost efficient by orders of thousands in the last two years and are continuing on that journey.”
Meatly’s process involves taking “a single sample of cells from one chicken egg one time,” Ensor explains, which is sufficient to create “an infinite amount of meat forever more.” The cells are fed with a mix of amino acids, vitamins and minerals for about a week, after which the meat is ready and has the consistency of “chicken pâté.”
Meat made this way is nutritionally equivalent to the real thing, he adds, but free of steroids, hormones or antibiotics. Depending on the methods used in traditional animal agriculture, Ensor says it uses 50 to 60% less land, 30 to 40% less water, and creates about 40% fewer CO2 emissions.
However, one of the biggest challenges for cultured meat companies is scaling up to be able to make enough product for a widespread commercial launch. Ensor says that Meatly currently uses 50-liter (13-gallon) bioreactors to grow its cells, but to be able to scale up production, it’s planning to move to a new facility that will employ 20,000-liter (5,200-gallon) bioreactors instead.
In product tests with dogs, he says the treat was enthusiastically received. “Many of them preferred it to their baseline diet,” he says.
Pet owners — who are technically barred from trying the product even if they wanted to, because it is not approved for human consumption — have also responded positively, Ensor adds. “Once you start explaining that the process is very similar to making beer and that is dramatically more sustainable (than conventional meat production), that we’ve done a lot of safety testing and have regular engagements with the regulators to make sure our process adheres to all of the necessary rules, people are just excited about it. A lot of people who have pets are animal lovers and want to find a more sustainable and kind way of feeding their pets.”
Humans next?
According to Tuck Seng Wong, a professor of biomanufacturing at the University of Sheffield, in the UK, and the deputy director of the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre, who’s not involved with Meatly, cultivated meat technology has advanced significantly and is now comparable in maturity to other alternative protein technologies, such as fermentation and insect cultivation. “Pet food accounts for up to a quarter of total meat consumption,” he says. “Therefore, developing an alternative method for pet food production that ensures food safety while preserving the essential nutrients pets require marks a significant milestone.”
As the technology continues to advance, he adds, the culture media used for growing animal cells will become increasingly cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. “Using cultured meat for pet food is a logical choice, provided it meets a price point acceptable to consumers while ensuring high food safety standards and maintaining, or even enhancing, the essential nutritional value for pets.”
Christopher Bryant, a psychologist and honorary research fellow at the University of Bath, who studies consumer acceptance of alternative meat, and is also not involved with Meatly, says that lab-grown meat still has to win over consumers. “There’s a lot of evidence that consumer acceptance of cultivated meat is strongly associated with familiarity,” he adds. “Once a product becomes more familiar in any form, it will tend to be viewed as more normal, and therefore will tend to be more accepted.”
After making pet food, which it hopes will help consumers familiarize with lab-grown meat, Meatly aims to make cultured protein for people, too. “The UK Food Standards Agency is currently undergoing a two-year project to set out the approval process for cultivated meat,” Ensor says.
“We hope to be part of that process, and everything in our production is safe for humans, it’s just we don’t have the regulatory pathway yet. But once that’s established, we would love to bring sustainable, healthy and kind meat to people as well.”