UK cultivated-meat business Meatly is claiming a world first as its dog snacks made from lab-grown chicken go on sale in its domestic retail market.
Chick Bites – made from plant-based ingredients combined with cultivated-meat – go on sale tomorrow (7 February) in a London branch of the pet store Pets at Home, one of the company’s investors.
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In a social media post today announcing the news, the London-based business said: “Meatly is the first company in the world to sell cultivated-meat for pets. We are also the first company ever to sell cultivated-meat to a European consumer.
“It will be sold in Pets at Home tomorrow in Brentford. This, alongside their early investment in Meatly, reinforces Pets at Home’s leading role in creating a sustainable and healthy pet-food industry.
“It also marks the start of a new chapter for Meatly, out of R&D and into the market. We’re excited to continue our incredible work to scale cultivated meat as quickly as possible and bring our sustainable, healthy, and kind Meatly chicken to your pet-food bowl.”
Meatly’s founding chief executive, Owen Ensor, was quoted by the UK’s The Guardian newspaper as saying: “Just two years ago, this felt like a moon shot. Today we take off. It’s a giant leap forward, toward a significant market for meat which is healthy, sustainable and kind to our planet and other animals.”
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By GlobalDataPets at Home chief operating officer, Anja Madsen, said: “This innovation has the potential to significantly reduce the environmental impact of pet food and will be a gamechanger for the industry.”
Like other cultivated-meat producers, Meatly’s produce is created in a lab from animal cells without animals coming to any harm.
The cost of producing such products, and specifically of the medium needed to grow the animal cells, is high, which is why mixing them with plant-based ingredients makes commercial sense. Meatly has collaborated with The Pack, which provided the plant-based ingredients for the product.
In July, the UK became the first country in Europe to back cultivated-meat for use in pet food, after chicken produced by Meatly was approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Animal and Plant Health Agency.
Meatly, which was established in 2022, said at the time it planned to launch the first samples of “commercially available pet food” this year and will start scaling production to reach “industrial volumes” in the next three years.
The company has been backed by investors to the tune of millions of pounds. Its board includes campaigner and former UK government ‘food tsar’ Henry Dimbleby.
