Called lab-grown, in vitro, cell-cultured, cultivated or synthetic meat, the idea of growing animal muscle tissue without the actual animals has been around for more than a century. An 1897 science fiction novel “Auf Zwei Planeten” by Kurd Lasswitz explored a Utopia where people dined on cultivated meat. Cell-cultured meat has remained in the realm of science fiction for most of the following century and a quarter. However, like artificial intelligence, drone warfare, fusion power and electric cars, the past few years have seen researchers catching up with readers. For the pet food industry, cell-cultured meat ingredients may be nearing the market.
Earlier this month, Meatly, a UK-based cultivated meat company, announced that it had produced canned cat food containing cultivated chicken as the main protein source. The product was created in collaboration with its brand partner, Omni, a novel protein pet food company in the UK. However, Meatly’s product is not on store shelves yet, as it lacks regulatory approval. The company is working with the UK’s Food Standards Agency and Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs. Those two agencies must approve any pet foods sold in the United Kingdom.
In February, Bond Pet Foods shipped its first two metric tons of cell-cultured animal protein to Hill’s Pet Nutrition, as part of a collaboration announced in 2021. The two metric tons of cultivated meat will allow Hill’s to formulate a variety of products at its Pet Nutrition Center in Topeka, Kansas for evaluation. That data will be used for the ingredient’s eventual review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, as well as to prepare prototypes for market evaluation.
As opposed to creating whole-muscle meat, cell-cultured chicken slurry may overcome economic and technical challenges faced by lab-grown meats while providing amino acids and other nutrients for pet food. In June 2023, BioCraft Pet Nutrition introduced a chicken cell line for both cat and dog foods. The cell-cultured chicken comes as a meat slurry, similar to that already used in the industry. Before developing the chicken cell culture line, BioCraft created mouse tissue in vitro. BioCraft changed its name from Because Animals. Geneticists have studied mice for decades and developed a greater knowledge of their DNA than most other animals. BioCraft’s team applied that biochemical knowledge when making cell-cultured mouse meat for use as a novel ingredient in cat treats.
In April 2023, two companies partnered to bring cell-cultured red snapper fish (Lutjanus campechanus) to the pet food industry. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the red snapper as vulnerable to extinction. CULT Food Science announced its collaboration with Umami Meats to supply cultivated red snapper for CULT’s pet food brands. CULT plans to use the cell-cultured red snapper meat in its Marina Cat treat line. However, like other cell-cultured pet foods, the planned cat treats made with tissue-cultured red snapper have not yet appeared on the market. The development of cell-cultured red snapper could reduce pressure on wild populations of the animal.
In November 2023, Czech startup Bene Meat Technologies obtained a registration certificate from the European Union’s (EU) European Feed Materials Register, enabling the company to produce and sell cultured meat for pet food. The business is planning to open a new production facility this year to increase its output capacity.
How cell-cultured meat is made
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, here’s how cell-cultured meat is made.
- Step 1: Manufacturers take a sample of cells from the tissue of an animal, using a process that does not harm or kill the animal. Scientists select cells from the sample. These cells are screened, grown and stored to serve as a bank of cells for later use.
- Step 2: Biologists take cells from this bank and grow them in a controlled and monitored environment using nutrients and other factors to encourage cellular multiplication.
- Step 3: After the cells have multiplied into billions or trillions of cells, protein growth factors, new surfaces for cell attachment, additional nutrients and other factros are added to the controlled environment to enable the cells to differentiate into various cell types and assume characteristics of muscle, fat or connective tissue cells.
- Step 4: After the cells differentiate into the desired type, scientists harvest the cellular material from the controlled environment and prepare it using conventional food processing and packaging methods.
Sustainability benefits and drawbacks of synthetic meat
Cell-culture supporters believe the technology will fulfill the demand for animal muscle tissue without the need for ranches. Growing meat in vitro hypothetically could reduce pollution and habitat loss associated with rearing, slaughtering and transporting livestock. Along with sustainability aspects, animal rights advocates hope cell-cultured meat will decrease demand for cattle, chicken and other livestock kept in captivity. Cell-cultured meats also reduce the chance of zoonotic disease spreading from livestock and wild game to people.
Although animal welfare advocates favor laboratories over feedlots, the wider effects of cell-based meat could negatively affect wildlife and the planet's interconnected ecosystems. Considering the importance of the environment to many pet owners, cellular agriculture may need to reduce its carbon footprint before pet food buyers accept the products, even as costs drop from a third of a million dollars that the first cell-cultured burger cost in 2013.
Supporters believe cell-culture technology will fulfill the demand for animal muscle tissue without the need for farms. Growing meat in vitro hypothetically could reduce pollution and habitat loss associated with rearing, slaughtering and transporting livestock. Along with resource use reduction, animal rights advocates hope cell-cultured meat will decrease demand for cattle, chicken and other livestock kept in captivity. Cell-cultured meats also reduce the chance of zoonotic disease spreading from livestock and wild game to people. Nevertheless, cell-cultured meat production requires specialized infrastructure, and the lifetime sustainability assessments of the products need to incorporate construction and other start-up costs. Producing meat the old-fashioned way remains much less expensive than cell-cultured novel pet food proteins.
Along with higher consumer prices, cell-based meats may take a heavier toll on the environment. The October 2023 issue of the journal Nature Food focused on cellular agriculture. In one of the articles, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland detailed challenges to assessing the ecological effects of the technology. With cellular agriculture in its infancy, assessing the environmental impact of a full-grown industry remains difficult.
In an earlier study, scientists at the University of Oxford assessed the effects of cellular agriculture on climate change. Their findings suggested that, over the long term, cultured meat production methods may require large enough energy inputs that the technology could increase global warming more than some types of cattle farming. Their analysis assumed that energy production remained dependent on fossil fuels. If people transition to renewable resources, the energy demands of cellular agriculture become less of a problem. The Oxford scientists simulated carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) produced as a result of beef from cattle versus cell-cultured meat and compared how global temperatures would rise.
“Cattle systems are associated with the production of all three greenhouse gases above, including significant emissions of CH4, while cultured meat emissions are almost entirely CO2 from energy generation,” the scientists wrote in a 2019 paper published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. “Under continuous high global consumption, cultured meat results in less warming than cattle initially, but this gap narrows in the long term and in some cases cattle production causes far less warming, as CH4 emissions do not accumulate, unlike CO2.”
While future developments in cellular agriculture may be able to beat conventional livestock at resource conservation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, current technologies have limited environmental sustainability credibility. Especially for pet food, plant-, fungus- and insect-based protein sources may remain the ecological choices into the near future.
