*The first cat food made with lab-grown chicken is set to launch in the U.S. later this year.
A London-based startup, Meatly, has created cruelty-free, faux-chicken cat food grown from a single fertilized egg. The product will roll out at Pets at Home stores in the U.K this summer.
“It’s very exciting to see the first ever cans of cultivated pet food fly off the production line,” Owen Ensor, the co-founder and chief executive, said, the Daily Beast reports. “We have an R&D partnership with a large pet-food manufacturer in America and are currently going through the regulatory hurdles. The model we have in the U.K. with a retailer and manufacturer relationships works well, so ideally we’ll try to replicate that with someone like PetSmart and Petco.”
The Daily Beast writes: “Cultivated meat, also known as cell-based or clean meat, is produced by growing animal cells in a giant stainless-steel tank, much like brewing beer. The company’s scientists extracted “a sample of cells from a single chicken egg” and grow them into a product that is biologically indistinguishable from the flesh of a slaughtered bird. It is also free of hormones, steroids and antibiotics—all things commonly found in factory-farmed meat.”
“Nobody has died for it. We didn’t have to raise and kill an animal,” Ensor said.
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“We use far less resources of water and land, less greenhouse emissions and we’re not razing rainforests, polluting rivers and oceans. We get to sidestep all of those issues while still providing healthy meat that’s far kinder.”
Ensor has sampled the product and said it “tastes just like chicken.”
His two cats also “love it,” he said.
Meatly is planning a product for dogs “as a lot of people don’t want to feed their dogs a plant diet.”
“Clean meat makes sense in every way, but the question is whether it will be safe for our cats and dogs,” said Lorenzo Capellino, CEO of the premium cat and dog food company Almo Nature, per the Daily Beast. “Almo Nature has decided to follow the research very closely, albeit with an absolute line of caution. Pet food could be one of the first areas in which these proteins will be tested, but we will only use these ingredients when there’s sufficient evidence of their suitability to meet the nutritional needs of dogs and cats.”
“I think once we’re able to prove that it’s safe and commercially viable the winds of change will come,” Ensor said. “One of the questions I get is, ‘What is it, what does it look like?’ Until people get to see it and experience it, the newness is a bit difficult. People care deeply about their companion animals and what’s best for them, so we need to provide that reassurance.”
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