In this instalment of The Cell Base's ‘Start-up spotlight,' we speak to Owen Ensor, founding CEO of Meatly, a British cultivated pet food start-up that, in July this year, received 'Europe's first' approval to sell cell-based meat.
Meatly recently received the world's first approval for cultivated pet food. How did this milestone come about?
Put simply, hard work and lots of it! We’ve been working closely with the UK's Food Standards Authority (FSA), Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), to provide them with all the necessary information to help make the decision to approve our cultivated meat as easy as it could be.
This process has included multiple lab visits and countless nutritional tests to ensure that our chicken is nutritionally identical to organically grown chicken breast. It’s been incredible to have our faith and hard work in this product reaffirmed by our regulatory approval. And it’s a shot in the arm for the UK & EU cultivated meat sector to have our chicken given the green light, bringing our sector up to speed with other innovators in approved countries like Singapore, Israel and the US.
What were the key regulatory hurdles you overcame to achieve the UK's first approval for any cell-based meat product? -
In the UK, approval for this sort of product has never been done before. So it was a learning curve for both Meatly as well as the three separate agencies (FSA, DEFRA and APHA) that were in charge of approving the product.
We approached these regulators with an open and transparent approach, which led to a fruitful, engaged and positive relationship. This was crucial for the necessary lab visits and tests that formed an integral part of the approval process, making it easier to overcome other hurdles, such as proving nutritional values and ensuring the product's safety and security.
How does the regulatory landscape for cell-based pet food differ from human food, and what can the human food industry learn from your experience?
Despite what you might think, there is actually more innovation going into pet food than human food as it stands. Manufacturers and brands are trialling new techniques like freeze-dried, cold-pressed and oven-baked, so the regulators are more familiar with innovators who are willing to experiment with food and technology.
Another difference is a focus on sustainability which has quickly become a key consumer driver. That means businesses in this space are willing to adopt new processes and techniques that can help them to achieve this as current practice doesn’t align with the goals of countries and consumers.
When it comes to learning, one key lesson is to be transparent and open with industry and regulators. As mentioned, we've engaged each key partner very openly and have built good relationships with them by continuously sharing where we're at and our focus, this has helped immensely during the approval process for our novel pet food product.
Can you describe the science and technology behind your cultivated meat production?
Our meat is real meat, made without animals. We took cells from a single chicken egg, just once, and now we can produce enough meat, right here in the UK, to feed our pets forever.
The process is not as science fiction as many would believe, in fact it’s as simple as three crucial steps:
We took a small sample of cells from a chicken egg, once. After this, we never use another animal product in our production, ever.
Just like making yogurt or beer, we nurture these cells in large containers that control temperature and pH.
Instead of animals eating grass and creating nutrients to feed these cells, we do it ourselves. We provide all the vitamins, minerals and amino acids the cells need to grow big and strong, until they become delicious, healthy meat.
When our meat is ready, we work with the world’s leading pet food manufacturers to make delicious meals for pets. The cells we harvest are pure chicken ready to be incorporated into pet food.
What challenges do you anticipate in scaling up your production for wider market reach?
As every cultivated meat start-up knows, scale and managing costs are the biggest challenges facing the industry. With regulatory approval in hand, we’re now making headway with other challenges such as reducing the production costs involved in making our meat.
For example, our science team has reduced the cost of the medium we feed our cells from hundreds of pounds to just £1 per litre. We’re now focusing on scaling up the equipment we use to make the chicken, the process has historically utilised small-scale biology equipment, and we now need to create products at an industrial scale without any impact to the quality of it.
How do you ensure the safety and quality of your cell-based meat products?
We guarantee safety through careful and comprehensive monitoring at every stage of production. This ensures that no unwanted chemicals, bacteria or other nasties can get into our meat. It’s just pure chicken. Nothing else. Additionally, in keeping with our approval from the necessary agencies, we have regular inspections to ensure the highest of standards are maintained and have conducted the most extensive safety tests including nutrition, sterility and more.
Arguably this means that our meat is potentially cleaner and safer than traditionally farmed chicken and consumers can rest assured that our chicken is made in the most sterile of environments, a far cry from the unethical factory farming that happens around the globe.
What impact do you foresee your approval having on the broader cell-based meat industry?
We’ve demonstrated that a cultivated meat company can secure approval in this country, and this should give other cultivated meat companies hope that they’re closer than ever to securing their own approvals.
While we are a business, we are driven by a purpose to help transform the food industry and ultimately create a more sustainable world for the future. We’re confident that once Meatly becomes available for sale to pets, we’ll showcase just how much demand there is from consumers for a kinder, more sustainable version of meat, and that our pets (as well as humans!) can thrive on it.
How do you envision the future of cultivated meat in the global food and beverage market?
We all know we can’t keep eating meat as usual. Demand is far outstripping supply, and currently, farmers need to use increasingly intensive processes to keep up with demand and stay afloat financially.
Cultivated meat, and other alt-proteins, hold the key to transforming the food industry into a fairer and more sustainable food system, filling the demand gap and allowing farmers to focus on creating high-quality, high-value products instead.
We need sustainable alternatives and cultivated meat is a key part of this. As more countries follow the example of Singapore, the US and Israel, and give cultivated meat regulatory approval, we’ll see the scaling challenges conquered and, in the near future, I hope that buying cultivated meat, whether for humans or pets, is as easy as it is to pick up traditionally farmed products.
What strategies are you employing to educate consumers and industry stakeholders about the benefits of cell-based meat?
There is certainly a need for this education of the consumer on all facets of cultivated meat, whether that is the process of creating it, the nutritional value it offers or the positives it offers in terms of a more sustainable and viable alternative for meat production going forward.
In terms of strategies, I think our greatest strength stems from our transparency. We want to be open with consumers as much as we are with the governing bodies. To this end, we’re working tirelessly to demonstrate the beneficial role that cultivated meat can have on our pets diet, offering them the exact same taste as meat, in a way that is nutritionally identical to regular traditional meat but created in a kinder, more ethical manner.
Furthermore, we hold regular feeding trials with dogs (and even my own two cats!) to see first-hand how pets interact with our cultivated meat and that it’s a product they love.
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