I’m looking at the future. I have to squint: it’s a slight opaqueness on the surface of a conical flask of clear liquid, being agitated by a small machine, in a small lab in White City, west London. “That cloudiness in the middle, that’s the cells,” says Owen Ensor. Ensor is the CEO of Meatly and this is his cellular baby: lab-grown chicken. I can see it better in the base of another flask: a centimetre or so of pinkish paste.
If you’ve never really thought about “cultivated meat”, it might be time to start: Meatly has just received UK authorisation to sell lab-grown chicken for pet food. With Pets at Home investing and the first “feeding trial” imminent – 25 dogs are being recruited, though Ensor’s cats Lamu and Zanzi, and Finn, another Meatly team member’s dog, are already enthusiastic consumers: I watch a video of Finn devouring a bowl of it – it’s a matter of when, not if.
So for anyone who saw and instantly disregarded the “most expensive burger in the world” (a prototype lab-grown product that cost an estimated £215,000) back in 2013, or those for whom lab-grown meat feels like spooky sci-fi, it’s over to Ensor for a basic primer. With no science background himself, he is good at keeping it simple. “We’re taking cells from an animal and making meat outside that animal. That is the simplest explanation.”
Meatly took a delivery of a single vial – smaller than your little finger – containing about 5 million cells from a single hen’s egg in September 2022 and no other animals have been involved since (with a slight caveat, explained later). That vial has now produced enough chicken to feed those 25 dogs, which means that apart from what’s in those flasks, there’s none for me to see – every precious gram is earmarked for the trial. That’s a long way from churning out pet food on an industrial scale, but it’s huge progress since Meatly – then just Ensor and his chief science officer Helder Cruz – arrived in an empty space in May 2022.
Lab-grown meat is probably happening here sooner rather than later: it’s already sold and eaten in Singapore, and the US has approved it for humans, too. Why should you care? Because it’s meat without killing. “You don’t need to involve animals in making real meat,” Ensor explains. He elaborates on the other upsides: “There’s no contamination risk … We don’t need to use any vaccines, any antibiotics or steroids or hormones. It’s a really pure form of chicken meat … It’s more sustainable and kinder.”
The sustainability angle is important, because we have a meat problem. Globally, per capita meat consumption has almost doubled since the 1960s and a study in 2021 found that meat accounts for nearly 60% of in food production. Meat is also a major driver of deforestation: a report last year found that 800m trees had been felled in Brazil for cattle farming in just six years. A paper in Nature this year estimated a transition to “cellular agriculture”, combined with green energy technologies, could .
That’s the sales pitch, but why don’t we just stop eating meat? Fair question, but not everyone wants to, or can, be vegan, and even those who are can be reluctant to feed their carnivorous cats and omnivorous dogs plant- or insect-based products, making the idea of cultivated-meat pet food particularly intriguing.
In a tiny office opposite the lab, Ensor – stumped by the coffee machine (he doesn’t drink it), slightly reticent about being the face of what he insists is absolutely a team effort, but otherwise warmly welcoming – patiently answers some silly questions. Has he tried it? Yes (though it’s only licensed for pets): “We’ve all eaten it. When it’s cooked, it tastes like chicken. It is chicken, so what else would it taste like?” (They chose to start with chicken because it’s the most commonly used pet food protein). It has a “paté consistency”, he says, and “compared to any plant-based meat, it is wildly better on taste.” How about the mythic egg from which they got their initial cells – did they meet the hen? Have they preserved the shell somewhere? Sadly not – the cells, boringly, came from “a very reputable cell line provider” – but there’s a plastic replica of what they’ve nicknamed “the golden egg” on a shelf. Why Meatly? It was his mother-in-law’s suggestion, Ensor says (the original name, Good Dog Food, proved impossible to Google).
So how does a 35-year-old international relations graduate end up in the cutting-edge cultivated meat business? Ensor is dyslexic, he says, but good at maths; during his “very normal, suburban” upbringing in Edinburgh it was suggested he become a banker. He did, briefly: “I couldn’t work out why I was there, or why it was interesting; who were these shareholders I was working for?” After spending time travelling, he worked for a management consultancy for a few years. Then, in 2015, he and his partner moved to Kenya, where he joined a startup working on breeding insects to use as chicken feed. Ensor helped scale it up from tiny lab-based experiments, raising $15m to build an industrial facility. “That really opened my eyes to the whole protein issue. There’s not enough land on Earth for us to make enough food for the population by 2050. How are we going to have enough protein, how do we grow it, and how do we use it currently?”
It was around then that Ensor became vegan. He had read Peter Singer’s seminal 1975 text Animal Liberation at university, but “hadn’t changed my habits; it kind of sat there”. Then, in Nairobi, he and his partner watched the pro-vegan documentary Cowspiracy. “She was like: ‘I think we should become vegan.’ I was like: ‘Do we need to?’” he laughs. He has never regretted it, he says, but veganism made his role in the insect startup untenable. He stepped back, and after a time spent advising companies on plant-based foods, he was approached by “cellular agriculture” venture capital firm Agronomics with an idea for a lab-grown pet food project.
Ensor brought in the “phenomenally experienced” Cruz, who has more than 20 years’ experience in cell therapy and a fistful of patents in cultivated meat technologies (he worked on that first burger). In May 2022, the two of them started with an empty room in this White City “scale-up” tech incubator. (“The future is here” reads the wall art, and it feels like it. Everyone is young – the average age at Meatly is 29.) There are now 11 Meatly employees of 11 nationalities; the majority are women.
With the basic techniques already established, Meatly’s twofold challenge was to eliminate cruelty and reduce cost. On the first, for cells to divide into more cells, making meat, it needed a “culture medium” providing the necessary nutrients. Historically, this medium contained foetal bovine serum (FBS), making it extremely costly – about £700 a litre – and cruel. FBS is extracted from pregnant cows when they are slaughtered. “Horrible,” Ensor says. “That was a strong red line.” Meatly has managed to replace FBS with a medium that is free from any animal components, though that’s where the aforementioned caveat comes in: the original cells that kicked off the project were grown in FBS. The team eliminated it “within weeks”, Ensor says, and removed all other animal components after a further month: “We haven’t used any animal components in the last two years.”
Perfecting an animal-free medium was not in itself groundbreaking: other companies in the sector have now done the same. What Meatly has achieved, though, is reduced the cost massively. “Our real breakthrough is to get this down to £1 per litre,” Ensor says. In addition, Meatly has gradually increased the yield of meat from a litre of medium from 2g to 10-15g. That’s far cheaper than a £215,000 burger but not the commercially viable pet food price it needs to achieve. More lab work is needed, then it can start scaling up – towards bigger bioreactors (the temperature and pH-controlled vessels in which cells and media are stirred together), in a light industrial site that would look like “a microbrewery type situation”. Meatly aims to produce chicken initially for £5-10 a kilo, “in line with premium ingredients in pet food”. (Finished pet foods are not 100% meat: cat food is around 80-85%; dog food often significantly less.)
They cleared another huge hurdle – regulatory approval – in July, when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Animal and Plant Health Agency gave Meatly the green light. Did they have a party to celebrate? No: Ensor saw it more as a “level unlocked”, signalling they could move on the next set of challenges. But he did get the team a bottle of champagne each.
One of those challenges is surely winning over opinion. The pet food industry, Ensor says, has been “very positive. Basically, every pet food manufacturer we speak to is saying: ‘When can we get some? We want to test it; we want to try it.’” Producers like the scope for eliminating contamination risks, and the fact that cultivated meat potentially offers a stable supply chain. “Pet food in the UK is booming and meat production in the UK is not booming … our pets have started competing with our own food chain.” Getting Pets at Home to invest was another big moment; an industry seal of approval in addition to some all-important cash. It’s a source of pride to Ensor how lean Meatly is – there has been lots of money swilling around the cultivated meat sector (more than $2bn since 2020), but they’ve got this far with just £3.6m. Some of the biggest crunch times, though, he says, have been around funding. “When the money runs out, those are pretty hard stops.”
It’s a crowded sector: Meatly’s main investor Agronomics alone is backing 20-plus “cellular agriculture” startups. Industry giants such as Cargill and Tyson, not to mention Bill Gates and Richard Branson, are investing, but these are still early, uncertain days and there will inevitably be winners and losers. In November 2023, one investor estimated 70-90% of current startups would fail within a year. In June, SCiFi Foods, a big, buzzy US cultivated meat player, became one of those casualties, citing insufficient funds. Ensor says the political environment SCiFi Foods faced in the US is tougher (Florida governor Ron DeSantis has banned lab-grown meat, promising to “save our beef” from the machinations of the “global elite”). The company also made the mistake of trying to scale up using expensive bio-pharma kit, he says, with the “false expectation, shared by many US startups, of being able to access unlimited investment to fund an unprofitable business model”.
Convincing consumers might prove even bumpier. Ensor makes a face when I suggest that people have a fairly significant ick around the idea of lab-grown meat – at least when it comes to eating it themselves. For him, that’s a communication failure by the industry, with misinformation filling the void. “When I explain it’s the same nutritional parameters, but we’re not using steroids and hormones and antibiotics, and we don’t need to raise and kill any animals, it becomes a bit, like, why wouldn’t you?” Once production is up and running, Meatly plans to start a “demystifying process”, hoping to win consumers over. “We’d love to have tours of where we’re making and growing the meat.” I wonder if this slightly underestimates our aversion, but the psychological barrier might be lower for feeding your pet rather than yourself. “Some research showed people would be more willing to feed it to their pets than eat it themselves, but I think a lot of that is vegans and vegetarians who aren’t that bothered about eating meat but do want to feed it to their pets.” Meatly doesn’t want to limit itself to vegan pet parents, though: “This is about everyone.”
Assuming I’m won over (as a vegan hesitant to get another dog, I’m probably their core consumer), when will I be able to buy Meatly products? Its website makes it sound tantalisingly imminent – “We are putting the finishing touches to our first pet food with our partners, and will be selling it in the UK very soon” – but it’s still years away, Ensor says. That’s progress: “At one point we were looking at decades.” Moving into this crucial next phase, he seems to be tempering excitement (“We’re only getting more ambitious, more excited, more confident we can do this,” he tells me) with caution. Maybe close proximity to all those scientists – carefully iterating, reiterating, testing, checking – has rubbed off: no one could accuse Ensor of counting Meatly’s chickens before they hatch.
