In a laboratory in west London, Helder Cruz reached into a refrigerator and took out a small plastic tub. The container contains 280 grams of off-white paste with a pâté consistency. These are real chicken cells, taken from a fertilized chicken egg and carefully grown in bioreactors opposite.
The paste doesn’t look particularly appetizing, but I’m not the target audience. These cells are intended as a no-kill ingredient for pet food, and the company that grows them, Meatly, has only been approved by UK regulators to produce its chicken cells for human consumption. pet. This is the first approval of a lab-grown pet food ingredient anywhere in the world.
Approval was granted by the Animal & Plant Health Agency (APHA) on July 2. In the UK, cultured animal cells intended for use in pet food are classified as an animal byproduct. The approval allows Meatly to sell its chicken cells to approved pet food manufacturers as an ingredient.
“We have been very active in contacting the regulators. We want to be very transparent, we want to bring everyone on this journey,” said Meatly CEO Owen Ensor. He said the startup has already sent some of its chicken cells to pet food manufacturers to they can run their own nutritional tests and test different pet food formulations made with Meatly cells as an ingredient.
Ensor said the first pet food containing Meatly’s cells is dog food, and it could be on UK shelves before the end of the year, but the release of the products is not a big priority for the company in now. “What needs to be done is cost cutting and scaling up,” he said, “However, releasing products is beneficial, so we get feedback from customers.”
The entire cultivated meat industry is still small compared to the trillion-dollar meat industry, and cultured pet food is a niche within a niche with some unique challenges. Producing animal cells in bioreactors is still very expensive, in large part because of the delicately balanced brew of proteins and nutrients the cells need to grow. And since the meat that goes into pet food is cheaper than meat for humans, the cost of cultured meat has to drop dramatically until it’s a viable pet food substitute.
There are several ways Meatly tries to cut costs. Chief scientific officer Helder Cruz said any final product could be made up of as little as 4 or 5 percent animal cells mixed with cereals and other plant-based ingredients, since most other foods -dogs in the market have mixed real meat with a large portion of cheaper. filler ingredients. The company is also trying to reduce production costs by replacing some of the expensive proteins in the liquid used to grow the cells with small molecules from cheaper sources.
The cells that go into Meatly’s chicken pâté come from commercially available cells derived from a fertilized chicken egg. Cells are spontaneously immortalized, which means they have the capacity to duplicate indefinitely, unlike non-immortalized cells, which stop growing after a certain number of duplications.
“One of our philosophies is to be very focused and very fast,” Ensor said. That means simplifying production by starting with off-the-shelf cell lines, and focusing mostly on chicken rather than trying many different species. “The less we do, the more progress we can make toward that goal.”
There are a handful of companies that are trying to make cultured pet food. Austrian company BioCraft Pet Nutrition produces cultured mouse meat, while Czech firm Bene Meat Technologies has produced some samples of its cultured meat for pet food. But these startups have raised small sums compared to companies hoping to commercialize cultured meat for humans.
“What’s most impressive is that not only did Meatly get the first approval, but it got there in just two years and with just £3.5 million. [$4.55 million]” on the investment, said Anthony Chow, cofounder of Agronomics, an early investor in Meatly.
According to Ensor, the finished ingredient is currently worth “double figures” in pounds sterling per kilo, but before it is mixed with other pet food ingredients. “It will be a premium product, because the prices are still high,” he said.