A step closer to lab-grown meat for humans?

It may once have been seen as just (a particularly beefy) pie in the sky, but could developments this week mean we’re now a tantalising step closer to seeing lab-grown meat on UK supermarket shelves?

In a historic moment for the sector, British cultivated meat business Meatly yesterday announced it had secured regulatory clearance to sell its cultivated chicken in petfood in the UK.

This ensured the company was not only the world’s first to achieve authorisation for lab-grown petfood, but also the first cultivated meat company to secure regulatory approval to sell its products in any European country, full stop.

Meatly’s chicken is manufactured by taking cells from a single chicken egg, before it is cultivated with vitamins and amino acids and grown in vats.

And just two years after the business was launched (with the relatively small financial backing of £3.5m by food sector investor Agronomics and retailer Pets at Home), Meatly is now looking at bringing its product to market.

The business was able to do this through “a close collaborative process” alongside the FSA, Defra and the Animal & Plant Health Agency (APHA), with Meatly CEO Owen Ensor hailing its success in securing the regulatory green light as “a significant milestone for the European cultivated meat industry”.

With Meatly having already “secured brand partnerships and production of its products with leading petfood brands”, its next step will be to launch retail trials later this year, before it spends the next three years scaling up production “to reach industrial volumes” in a bid to further reduce costs.

What is Meatly protein?

And given how Meatly’s protein-free media (the mix of nutrients used to grow animal cells and the building blocks of any lab-grown meat) already costs less than £1 a litre to manufacture, Ensor said Meatly had proven “there is a safe and low-capital way to rapidly bring cultivated meat to market”.

As Meatly’s investor and the founder of Agronomics Jim Mellon put it, this week’s developments marked a “landmark event for the industry”.

The business expects its cultivated chicken to use up to 64% less land and 28% less water than traditionally sourced chicken.

So with dogs and cats estimated to consume the equivalent of 20% of the total meat eaten globally, displacing traditionally-produced meat with cultured meat could “play a crucial part in reducing the emissions, resource consumption and animal suffering caused by traditional meat production”, Mellon added.

In a sign that lab-grown petfood could be where it’s at, a second company, Canada’s Cult Food Science Corp, is also eyeing the category.

It today announced its Noochies petfood brand expected to complete the feeding trials necessary for regulatory approval by the US’s Food & Drug Administration for dogfood products containing cultivated chicken “later this month”.

But amid all this progress with lab-grown meat in petfood, where does it leave cultivated meat for human consumption? Understandably, it has a higher regulatory bar to clear.

Streamlined process

As The Grocer reported in March, plans to speed up the regulatory approval of products such as cultivated meat, novel foods and CBD was high up the political agenda before the Tories lost the general election – and had been encouraged by the FSA itself, as a way of tackling the regulatory logjam that has caused consternation within the above sectors.

With the typical approval process taking on average more than two years, the FSA announced proposals for sweeping changes to “streamline our regulatory process” by designing “an agile, responsive, future-proofed service” that would “facilitate innovation and enterprise”.

The FSA has also proposed working with other countries to hasten regulatory approval, but the brakes were then put on its plans by the election.

And as we reported last week, with Labour’s priorities seemingly lying elsewhere – in the short-term at least – there are now concerns within the industry that it may not have the bandwidth to press ahead with the FSA’s radical proposals for reform just yet.

All this could leave the companies that have applied for approval of cultivated meat for human consumption kicking their heels for some time.

Responding to The Grocer this week, the FSA confirmed the two applicants for this approval – known to be the UK’s Ivy Farm and France’s Vital Meat – had yet to be authorised, giving no timescale for the end of its process of scrutiny.

When that happens, nobody yet knows, but with Meatly having now broken the regulatory dam, pressure on the FSA and the government to take the next step shows no sign of easing.