In July, the UK approved cultivated meat for pet use in food. Now, a London-based start-up has launched the first product that includes lab-grown meat.
Chick Bites, which features plant-based protein along with lab-grown chicken meat cultivated from one chicken egg, is now only sold in one shop. But it could be a game changer for pet food.
Lab-grown meat
The UK has become the first European country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat. Whereas other countries (like Singapore or Israel) are growing meat for human consumption, Britain is trying it out for pet food.
The new product was launched by Pets at Home, one of the largest pet retailers in the UK and Europe. A limited release has gone on sale at one shop in West London, but the plan is to release it gradually to over 400 stores.
The product was made by Meatly, a company that was only founded in 2021.
“Just two years ago this felt like a moonshot. 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,” says Meatly’s founding chief executive, Owen Ensor.
The innovation is cultivated chicken. It starts by taking a small sample from a chicken egg and then cultivating in a lab, along with vitamins and amino acids. Then, the cells are grown in a container, resulting in paté-like paste. The result is not an imitation or a chicken-like product. It’s chicken, except no animals were killed for it.
Why this is such a big deal
The appeal of lab-grown meat works on multiple levels. For starters, you don’t kill any animals in the process. Over 200 million chickens are slaughtered every day, reaching a whopping 73 billion per year.
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Pet food is also a significant contributor to this. Despite claims that pet food uses rendered meat (meat that wouldn’t be eaten by humans anyway), that claim isn’t backed by data. The environmental impact of pet food is also striking.
According to one study, an area double the size of the UK is used to produce dry pet food for cats and dogs each year. If pet food was a country, it would rank higher than Chile or Morocco.
“Pet ownership has a significant. and increasing, impact on land use, and in generating greenhouse gas emissions. This should be considered in efforts to make global food systems more sustainable,” said Professor Dominic Moran from the University of Edinburgh, co-author of the above-mentioned study.
By shifting to cultivated meat for pet food, companies like Meatly hope to drastically reduce this environmental footprint. Compared to traditional meat production, lab-grown meat requires far fewer resources — using less land and water while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions. If widely adopted, this could mark a turning point in making pet food more sustainable, aligning the industry with broader efforts to combat climate change and reduce animal suffering.
Can lab-grown pet food go mainstream?
While the launch of Chick Bites is a major milestone, the success of lab-grown pet food in the long run will depend on several key factors: scaling production, reducing costs, regulatory approval, and consumer acceptance.
Right now, producing cultivated meat remains relatively expensive. Meatly, like other companies in this space, will need to bring down costs by optimizing the growth process, improving cell culture techniques, and eventually scaling up production. Most forecasts suggest that the price of cultivated meat can go well below that of existing meat, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is consumer perception. Many people are unfamiliar with lab-grown meat, and some may be hesitant to feed it to their pets. Overcoming skepticism will require education about its safety, nutritional benefits, and sustainability. If major pet food brands embrace the technology, it could help normalize cultivated meat for pet owners.
But there’s another opportunity here. Lab-grown pet food also has the potential to revolutionize pet nutrition. You could grow food specially made for your pet because the process allows for precise control over ingredients. Companies could tailor food to meet the specific dietary needs of individual pets. This could mean personalized formulas that cater to pets with allergies, digestive sensitivities, or breed-specific health concerns. Lab-grown meat could even be enriched with targeted nutrients, leading to healthier, longer-living pets.
For now, cultivated meat remains in a strange limbo. They’re approved for human consumption in Israel, Singapore, and most of the US, but not in the UK and Europe. If cultivated pet food succeeds, it could pave the way for broader acceptance of lab-grown meat for human consumption. In the long run, what starts as an alternative for pets could end up changing the way we think about food altogether.
