Meatly CEO: Slaughter-free pet food prepares to take off after regulatory approval

24 Jul 2024 --- Meatly recently received UK regulatory clearance to sell cultivated meat for pet food, marking a landmark decision. CEO and co-founder of the company, Owen Ensor, sat down with Food Ingredients First to discuss this leap forward for the nascent cultivated food industry. 

In this in-depth interview, he dives into how cultivated chicken is produced and how scale-up and commercialization are now on the horizon following last week’s regulatory approval. Crucially, he addresses how slaughter-free pet food offers dog and cat owners a way to negotiate the paradox of feeding their beloved pets with meat from animal livestock.

This is a leap forward for the industry. Explain how cultivated chicken is produced and how it’s used in pet food.
Ensor: This is an incredibly exciting moment for the whole cultivated meat industry. Our team of incredibly talented biologists has been working hard over the last 18 months, and we’ve been working proactively with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Food Safety Authority UK regulators to get this approved. Fundamentally, cultivated meat is real meat. We take a single sample of cells from one egg at one time. From that, we can create an infinite amount of chicken for everyone. 

We do that by running it through a process-based image of fermentation, like how we make beer or yogurt. By putting it in warm vessels, you can find the nutrients it needs, and then cells will double and grow. Then we can harvest them. We sell them (as chicken ingredients) to pet food manufacturers. So, we are just producing chicken. 

We recently spoke with Owen Ensor, Meatly's CEO on what the UK approval means for the company.It comes in paste consistency and pet food manufacturers can then formulate it into the traditional pet foods they’ve always been making. This is a one-to-one switch from conventional chicken.

Meatly is the first to get this kind of approval. Is it a UK government approval, or are you the first company in Europe?
Ensor: We’re the first in Europe to get any approval for any sort of cultivated meat, for pet food or human food. We are only the fourth company globally to ever get approval for cultivated meat. It’s still a very nascent industry, and we’re incredibly excited to be leading this wave in Europe.

Some pet owners face the dilemma of feeding their cats and dogs from slaughtered livestock. It doesn’t sit well with them. So this must be a key driver for you. Please explain how that taps into your innovation and what are the other drivers.
Ensor: There are a few wonderful attributes of cultivated meat. It’s incredibly healthy. It has all of the nutrients that our cats and dogs need to thrive, just like traditional chicken. It’s also very safe. We don’t use antibiotics, hormones or steroids, so it’s a very safe form of meat. It’s also dramatically more sustainable. We use much less water, land and CO2, and then, finally, it’s much kinder. We use a single egg one time and never involve another animal in our production process ever again. We can avoid raising and killing animals, a key concern in the pet industry, which is all about a love for animals. A lot of people want to avoid the animal lovers paradox, as it’s called. This is where you love animals and want to get a pet, and then you have to harm other animals to feed the pet.

A while ago, we saw innovation and R&D in vegan pet food, which did not take off as people expected. So, this is something different. What are your expectations for it? 
Ensor: I think there was a lot of interest in insect-based and plant-based diets for pets, but they didn’t see the kind of consumer attraction that a lot of companies were hoping for with cultivated meat. We want to give consumers an easy choice. We want to present them with chicken that they’ve always fed their pets and has all the nutrients they need but is very healthy, safe and far more sustainable. We would love this to become a mainstay protein source for the pet food industry, and we’re working with several partners.

How do you anticipate getting all of these important messages to the end consumer so they understand what the product is?
Meatly's cultivated meat addresses the "animal lovers' paradox" by offering consumers a safe form of meat that is also sustainable.Ensor: We are working with a lot of partners at the moment. We sell to two pet food manufacturers. Part of the advantage of that is we can work with them to communicate to their existing consumers and audiences. One of our main investors and partners is Pets at Home, who I’m sure people are familiar with. This is the UK’s largest pet retailer, and again, they have a lot of incredibly well-trained and informative in-store colleagues who can help communicate this message. It’s really by talking to the media and working with partners in the pet industry, vets, influencers and other people who can help us get connected now.

Do you expect this to start a wave of further regulatory approvals in the UK, Europe and beyond? 
Ensor: There are very few companies focused on cultivated meat for pet food. I hope there will be more coming, and I think the approvals for human food will take slightly longer. The pathway there hasn’t been as well defined yet by the FSA, and that might take a few years. But I do think there is a lot of innovation happening in cultivated meat. There are a lot of great companies doing wonderful work to make this happen, and it will become more present in our supermarkets and homes. 

How vigorous was your consultation process? Summarize some of the things that you had to go through with the authorities.
Ensor: We had a very open, transparent and proactive conversation with the FSA, Defra and Animal and Plant Health Agency, which are three obviously slightly different regulators coming at it from a different perspective. We shared a lot of information with them. We had a lot of visits to our facility and communicated with them about what we’re doing and why we’re excited about it. Also, the safety dossier we’ve put together is very robust and extensive, reassuring them. Since our inception, we’ve wanted to bring everyone on this journey: pet parents, pet food companies and regulators. We’ve been proactive in communication over the last 18 months.

What are the next steps?
Ensor: We will be conducting feeding trials with dogs in August, and then, hopefully, we’ll conduct a small pilot production toward the end of this year and produce small samples that we can share with consumers. We are focused on cost reduction and making this as affordable as possible for everyone. We will start scaling next year and producing more significant volumes and consistently supplying products to our pet food manufacturing partners. 

By Gaynor Selby