Meatly: UK approval to use cultivated meat in pet food
19 Jul 2024 | Meatly
Meatly has become the first-ever European company authorized to sell cultivated meat, following UK clearance for its cultivated pet food. CEO & co-founder Owen Ensor speaks to us about the long-awaited approval. He explains how Meatly’s forthcoming slaughter-free pet food offerings will help overcome the “animal lovers paradox,” where dog and cat owners don’t want to feed their beloved pets with meat from animal livestock.
Hello, I'm Gaynor Selby, senior editor of Food Ingredients First.
I'm joined today by Owen Ensor, the CEO and founder of Meatly, a cultivated meat company.
So Meatly has just received regulatory clearance to sell cultivated meat for pet food in the UK, marking a landmark decision.
So Owen, tell us about this.
This is a leap forward for the industry and explain how cultivated chicken is produced and how it's used in the pet food.
Yeah, this is an incredibly exciting moment for the whole cultivated meat industry.
Our team of incredibly talented biologists have been working very hard over the last 18 months, and we've been working very proactively with DEFRA and the FSA and APHA, the UK regulators to get this approved.
So fundamentally, cultivated meat is real meat.
We take a single sample of cells from one egg one time, and from that we can create an infinite amount of chicken for everyone.
We do that by, running it through a process very similar to fermentation.
So how we make beer or yogurt, you put it in warm vessels, you find the nutrients they need, and then the cells will double and grow.
And then we can harvest them.
We sell them to pet food manufacturers.
We sell chicken ingredients.
We're just using chicken.
It comes in a kind of pate consistency.
And pet food manufacturers can then formulate that into the traditional pet foods that they've always been making, so the 1 to 1 switch out for traditional chicken.
I see, interesting.
So, it's been a long time coming, this sort of 18 month consultation.
So you're really the first to get, is it just UK government approval or are you the first in Europe?
So we're the first in Europe to get any approval for any sort of cultivated meat for pet food or human food.
And we're only the 4th company globally to ever get approval for cultivated meat.
So it's still a very nascent industry, and we're incredibly excited to be leading this wave in Europe.
Yeah, I'm sure.
So some pet owners, they face the dilemma of feeding their cats and dogs, from slaughtered livestock.
It doesn't sit with them, so I'm sure this is a key driver for you, and talk about that, explain how that, that taps into your innovation and what might the other drivers be.
There's a few wonderful attributes of cultivated meat.
So, firstly, 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 any antibiotics or hormones or steroids.
We don't use any genetically modified organisms or genetic engineering.
And so it's a very safe form of meat.
It's also dramatically more sustainable.
We use a lot less water, a lot less land, and less CO2.
Then finally, as you say, it's much kinder.
We use a single egg one time, and we never involve another animal in our production process ever again.
And so, we can avoid raising and killing animals.
And as you say, it's a key concern in the pet industry, which is all about a love for animals, and a lot of people want to avoid the animal lover's paradox, as it's called, where you have a, you love animals, so you want to get a pet, and then you have to harm other animals to feed the pet.
Yeah, a while ago we were seeing innovation and research and development in kind of vegan pet food.
So this is, which perhaps not really took off as people expected.
So this is, this is something different, of course.
And what are your expectations for it?
That's exactly right.
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 meats, 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 their pets need, but is very healthy, it's safe, and it's far more sustainable and.
So we would love this to become a mainstay, mainstay protein source for the pet food industry, and we're working with several partners.
Yeah, right, so how do you anticipate getting all of these important messages out to the end consumer so they understand what the product is and why they should.
So we're working, yeah, we're working with a lot of partners at the moment.
So we sell to pet food manufacturers.
And 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 a lot of people are familiar with is the UK's largest pet retailer.
And again, they have a lot of incredibly, -trained and informative in-store colleagues who can help communicate this message.
So it's really, By events like this and talking to media and also working with those partners in the pet food industry as as vets and influencers and other people who can help us get the message out.
Do you expect this to be the start of a real big wave of further regulatory approvals in the UK, Europe and beyond?
There's very few companies focused on cultivated meats for pet food currently.
There may be more, and I hope there, there will be more coming.
And I think the approvals for human food will take slightly longer.
The pathway there hasn't been as defined yet by the FSA, and that might take a few years, but I do think there's a lot of innovation happening in cultivated meat.
There's a lot of great companies doing a lot of wonderful work to make this happen.
And it will become a more present in our, in our supermarkets, in our homes very soon.
For sure.
So just how vigorous was your kind of consultation process?
Summarize some of the things that you had to go through with the authorities.
We had a very open, transparent, and proactive conversation with the FSA, DEFRA, and APHA, which are three, obviously, slightly different regulators coming at it from a different perspective.
So we shared a lot of information with them.
We had a lot of visits to our facility, and a lot of kind of communication with them about what we're doing, why we're excited about it, how the safety dossier we've put together, which is very robust and extensive, to provide them the reassurance.
Since our inception, we've wanted to bring everyone on this journey and the.
You know, pet parents, pet food companies, and regulators, and so we've been very proactive in communicating with them over the last, yeah, 18 years.
Sure.
OK, and you've said that Meatly's primary focus is on a cost reduction, getting over these types of challenges, and the company will start scaling production to reach the, the industrial volumes that you need over the next 3 years.
So what can we expect to see as the next steps?
So we'll be doing feeding trials with dogs in August, and then hopefully we'll do a small kind of pilot production towards the end of this year and produce small samples that we can share with consumers.
And then next year we'll start scaling.
So, as you say, we're focused on cost reduction at the moment, so making this as affordable as possible for everyone.
And then we'll start scaling next year and then we can start producing more significant volumes and consistently supplying products to our pet food manufacturing partners.
So when and where will pet owners be able to get hold of these products on the shelves?
At scale, that will take a few years.
So we're still, again, in this optimization phase and scale-up phase.
It'll likely be available in our partner Pets at Home, and they'll be kind of the initial distributor of this.
And so we did advise all consumers to look out for it.
