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Britain's Meatly hopes next year to start selling food for dogs and cats containing cultured meat, having become the first pet food company in the world to get a green light from regulators.
It's been just over 11 years since the first burger made from meat grown in a laboratory was served to a human, offering the world the promise of a kinder, more sustainable form of meat production.
That single patty, created by Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post, cost more $300,000 to make. Since then, production costs have fallen far enough for a few American companies to offer "cultured meat" at select restaurants in the United States. Earlier this year, one of them, Eat Just, started selling a lab-grown chicken product at an upmarket butchery in Singapore.
Now, lab-grown meat is poised to enter a domain that few would have thought possible even a year ago. A British company, Meatly, recently received approval from regulators in the United Kingdom to sell lab-grown meat in pet food — a milestone it said was a world-first. The announcement may have surprised some folks because pet food traditionally is a cheaper product sold at high volume to make a profit. Has Meatly gotten costs low enough for dog bowls?
The answer is not quite yet, according to CEO and co-founder Owen Ensor, who told the VIN News Service that Meatly nevertheless is aiming for a commercial launch in the first half of next year.
"The cost is too high — currently," Ensor said. "We still need to do more. So in the next six to nine months, we're aiming to be at a commercially viable price point — and then we'll start scaling the process up."
Working in Meatly's favor is that, unlike companies that grow meat in the lab for human consumption, it doesn't have to worry about making its food look and feel like meat. Rather, its product has a pâté consistency.
"Pets have less specific visual expectations of their food," Ensor said. "So we don't need to do these very complex, difficult steps of differentiation and scaffolding — making the cell into a specific fat cell, muscle cell or kidney cell, and then scaffolding it to look like steak."
Ensor said Meatly has made big strides reducing the costs of its media — the nutrients it feeds its cells — and is working on slashing the cost of running the large bioreactors needed to produce at scale. But he wouldn't say how much the company expects to charge, only confirming that it will initially be a premium product.
"It's going to be the most sustainable, healthiest, kindest meat that's ever been produced for pets, and we want to start that at a higher price point," he said. "But then, obviously, we'll be trying to bring the cost down as low as possible and make this as available and plentiful in the mass market."
Although prices on pet foods may differ significantly, Eat Just's product sold in Singapore for people demonstrates the cost challenges faced by lab-grown meat producers. Its frozen chicken retails for SG$7.20 for a 120-gram package. That's equivalent to $5.61 for about a quarter-pound of chicken. The product contains only 3% cultured meat. The rest is plant-based "meat" similar to what's been proffered for years by the likes of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.
At least one other startup is taking a less ambitious but potentially less cost-intensive approach. Bond Pet Foods, based in Boulder, Colorado, has stopped short of growing muscle cells for pet food. Rather, it's only making meat protein through a process called precision fermentation that essentially involves introducing chicken DNA into yeast cells, then brewing the protein as if it were craft beer. The end product is then dried and ground into a fine powder.
"The distinction is important because we're not inventing a new process to create these ingredients," Bond's CEO and founder Rich Kelleman said. "We're creatively reassembling a technology that's been around for more than half a century to make everything from enzymes for cheese manufacturing to vitamin B12 to vanilla."
Bond, which has partnered with several established pet food companies, most notably Hill's Pet Nutrition, is seeking approval for its brewed meat protein from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It hopes to start selling it in 2026, and, like Meatly, will initially target the premium pet food market.
Of course, Meatly, Bond and dozens of startups like them don't just have cost challenges to overcome. Consumers will want to know about the nutritional value, safety and palatability of products that — particularly in the case of cultured meat — have been branded by critics as "Frankenmeat" for the unnatural way they're produced.
Questions also remain about the environmental benefits of alternative meat products, considering they have a carbon footprint of their own. Purveyors also face regulatory risk, as a growing number of jurisdictions — such as Italy and the U.S. states of Alabama and Florida — ban cultured meat sales to protect their agriculture industries.
How is lab-grown meat made?
The processes used to make cultivated meat have their roots in regenerative medicine. Cells — be they stem cells or muscle cells — are taken from an animal, placed in a petri dish and fed nutrients like sugars, metabolites, vitamins and minerals. Once a favored cell line is cultured, production can be scaled up in bioreactors.
Bioreactors used for decades in medicine are too small to make food for the mass market, presenting an infrastructure challenge. Moreover, most animal cells stop dividing at some point, in a phenomenon known as the Hayflick limit. So-called immortalized cells, which reproduce indefinitely, exist but are harder to come by.
One natural source of immortalized cells is tissue stem cells, though they are technically challenging to culture at scale. Cells also can be genetically modified to become immortal, say, by injecting them with a virus. A third option — and one favored by many cultured meat producers, including Meatly — is to identify cells that have become immortal through a phenomenon known as spontaneous immortalization.
"Every time a cell divides, it accumulates a mutation of some sort," explained Ramiro Alberio, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham. "Some mutations are inconsequential; some of them will lead to immortalization, which means uncontrolled cell growth."
If the words "uncontrolled cell growth" provoke alarm, it may be because it's a feature shared by cancer cells.
Purveyors of cultured meat maintain that it would be impossible for a human, dog or other animal to get cancer from ingesting immortalized cells. Scientists, too, discount the possibility. "There's no evidence that cells can cause cancer by just ingesting them," Alberio said.
The FDA, when approving a lab-grown chicken product for human consumption in 2022, said cultured cells would lose their reproductive capacity after leaving a bioreactor in any case, and then would be broken down by processing, such as cooking, and a person's digestive system.
At least one survey indicates that consumers are willing to feed their pets cultured meat. Still, using a production process even remotely associated with the word "cancer" could present PR challenges.
Veterinarians see potential
Not surprisingly, veterinary nutritionists contacted by VIN News were reluctant to provide a detailed evaluation of cultured meat's suitability for pets, given no product has hit the market yet. Still, they expressed some enthusiasm for its potential to provide a sustainable form of nutrition.
"I had thought, perhaps wrongly, that it was difficult to scale up production to profitable commercial levels," said Dr. Marge Chandler, a consultant in both small animal nutrition and internal medicine in Glasgow, Scotland. "Like with all the newer foods, most of us would like to see long-term feeding trials on a variety of breeds before making recommendations. I certainly don't see how one could get cancer from these foods, but I can see how the media might want to spin that story."
In the U.S., Dr. Jonathan Stockman, an associate professor at Long Island University's veterinary school in New York, said he expects any company using new protein sources, whether from cultured meat or insects, to perform a full nutritional analysis and test safety and digestibility in live animals. For cultured meat, however, he stopped short of calling for long-term feeding trials.
"Unlike insects, cultivated meat is the same as meat from slaughtered animals, except it was grown in the lab. Therefore, I don't think long-term feeding studies are necessary before I can recommend such a diet …," he said.
Taking a bigger-picture view, Dr. Scott Campbell, a veterinary nutritionist in Brisbane, Australia, said that with any cutting-edge technology, adoption should be made with caution.
"I think we have to consider all options when it comes to maintaining sustainability, but I can absolutely understand people's reticence, as it is an unnatural process even though it ends with something resembling a natural product," he said. "I don't doubt the nutritional value, but it's possible there could be unknown challenges still to be encountered. Exploration is exciting but comes with risks, not all of which are known in advance."
Proponents court consumers, investors
Alberio, the developmental biologist, says immortalized cells present unique challenges in an economic sense, too. For instance, he says, spontaneous immortalization is an unpredictable process. "It's very haphazard whether it happens efficiently or not."
Meatly, for its part, acknowledges spontaneous immortalization occurs randomly, but posits it only needs to happen once. "Once you have an immortalized cell line, it will remain immortalized forevermore and does not need to continually happen, so there is no variability in production whatsoever," Ensor maintained.
The company says its product has the same nutritional profile as chicken meat, containing the same amount of amino acids and fatty acids. "It's exactly the same as chicken breast, but it's more sustainable, it's kinder and we don't use any antibiotics, steroids or hormones in the process," Ensor said.
Meatly didn't have to conduct feeding trials to obtain approval for sale in the U.K. Rather, it had to prove its chicken is free of pathogens like viruses and meets its claimed nutritional profile. Meatly employs a veterinary nutritionist and has voluntarily conducted two short feeding trials — 19 dogs for one day and 12 dogs for one week — to assess palatability and rule out adverse effects. Ensor said Meatly is planning to conduct more feeding trials, including long-term trials, to build "a robust evidence base that we can share with the industry."
Bond, for its part, doesn't use immortalized cells because it's not making animal muscle. It has conducted two six-month feeding trials of its fermented meat protein on dogs. "The goal is to have brewed meat protein — a chicken protein, a turkey protein — that has some semblance of familiarity with pet parents that, with some additional education and explanation, they'd be willing to give it a try," Kelleman said.
Environmental benefits tested
Cultured meat companies point out that raising livestock entails consuming vast amounts of energy, land and water — plus the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, by burping cattle. And pet food comprises a large chunk of the livestock industry's carbon footprint, according to a University of California, Los Angeles, study, which estimated that feeding dogs and cats accounts for 25-30% of the environmental impacts from all animal production in the U.S.
Some studies, including one led by a life-cycle analyst in the Netherlands, indicate cultured meat's carbon footprint could be substantially lower than the livestock industry's, especially if manufacturing is powered by renewable energy. By contrast, a study published last year as a preprint by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found that when considering the energy consumption of bioreactors and other tools in the process, cultured meat's carbon footprint will exceed that of the beef industry's. Industry experts responded with an open letter criticizing the paper's assumptions.
Ensor maintained that academic research on cultured meat generally tends to be years out of date. For example, he said, the UC Davis paper assumed cultured meat will be made with pharmaceutical-grade growth media rather than food-grade media, which is cheaper to procure and more sustainable. "We are making daily improvements on our process, rapid cost reductions — we're testing and adopting food-grade ingredients already," Ensor said.
Bond's Kelleman posits that traditional pet food companies are partnering with startups like his because they've done the math and realized protein production comprises a large part of their carbon footprints. Moreover, he says, they want to foolproof their supply chains. "They have a line of sight that five, 10 years down the road, they will be challenged to be able to procure enough animal protein," he said. "We can give them something they can more consistently procure."
Further complicating the sustainability case is the fact that a lot of pet food is made from offcuts of meat bound for human consumption. Cultured and brewed meat producers insist there will be a net environmental benefit, regardless.
Perversely, if the cultured meat industry for human consumption prospers, companies making it expressly for the pet market could face a new breed of competitor. "That industry itself will generate a lot of byproduct and not-for-human-consumption quality products," Alberio said. "That could be used for the pets."
Overall, Alberio said cultured meat companies still have much to prove about sustainability and, especially for pet food manufacturers, cost-effectiveness. "The devil is in the detail, and investors will keep asking the same questions they're asking the other 150 companies doing this," he said.
Still, he admits his views on cultured meat are softening. "Look, when I got into this area in 2018, I was super skeptical," Alberio said. "Now, in six years, I've seen so much progress and so much consumer attitude change, I think it has potential. I think it's going to be good for the future. It's just when that's hard to tell."