“Within the next five years, we expect cultivated meat production to be integrated directly into the operations of leading pet food manufacturers, driving their commercial success and supporting consistent quality, greater supply resilience and more sustainable nutrition for pets worldwide.” That’s the outlook from two executives at BeneMeat, a cultivated meat producer that launched a dog treat in Europe in September 2025 to test consumer reception.
(Jan Lupich, strategic partnerships lead, and Katharina Eist-Holland, Ph.D., head of strategic development, for BeneMeat, will present results of the test program, called Try & Share, at Petfood Forum Europe 2026 on May 11 in Nuremberg, Germany.)
Data from a consumer survey conducted in late 2023 by Bond Pet Foods, a purveyor of brewed animal protein, showed relatively high awareness of cultivated meat (nearly 39%) relative to other alternative proteins, and almost 35% said they’d consider feeding it to their pets. Yet the survey had a small sample size (127 people), skewed toward younger, college-educated women with higher household incomes.
Still, are those results positive and optimistic enough to convince pet food manufacturers to develop products using cultivated meat?
Education and trials are critical
As with any newer, unfamiliar ingredient, the key to gaining consumer acceptance is education. “Consumers are interested, but uncertain,” said Owen Ensor, co-founder and CEO of Meatly, which makes cultivated protein from chicken cells. “It’s kind of, what is it? What does it look like? Why should I feed my pet this? There’s a bit of just skepticism, I would say, which I completely understand. It is totally valid. Our job is just to explain what cultivated meat is and why we’re excited about it.”
Speaking during an episode of the Trending: Pet Food podcast, hosted by my colleague Lindsay Beaton, Ensor said he often describes his interest and excitement about his product by talking about his two cats and how they were the first pets to eat Meatly “chicken.”
Transparency is also important, he added. “When we start our pilot facility, as much as possible, we would love to have journalists, members of the public come and visit and show them what we’re doing. We have nothing to hide. We are incredibly excited about our process. It is clean, it’s sterile, it’s completely traceable. We’re very open to sharing images, videos, introducing the team to people. We will be very transparent about what we’re doing, the data we find, etc. I think that will do a lot to build trust with consumers.”
BeneMeat’s strategy to build that relationship was to launch its Try & Share program, in which hundreds of participants across multiple countries in Europe received dog treats with cultivated meat and recorded their observations through structured feedback addressing their dogs’ acceptance, perceived naturalness, safety perception and willingness to purchase. Preliminary results show prior exposure to educational materials and hands-on experience meaningfully impacted acceptance and perceived product value.
Pet food offers way to wider usage, acceptance
Several obstacles — especially scalability and, relatedly, high costs — currently stand in the way of cultivated meat earning wider usage and acceptance for either human food or pet food. Yet pioneers in the field believe pet food provides a path to eventual success.
If a company can “crack the code for pet food, the path to commercialization could be relatively easier,” said Rich Kelleman, CEO of Bond Pet Foods, quoted by Emily Anthes in a July 2025 New York Times article. Pet food companies don’t need to replicate the experience of biting into a perfectly crisped drumstick, Anthes wrote. “For dogs and cats, it has to taste good,” Mr. Kelleman explained. “But it doesn’t necessarily have to taste like chicken, exactly.”
Ensor agrees. “I think pet food has been an incredible starting point for us. We love the pet industry and we’re very close with a lot of pet food manufacturers,” he said during the podcast. “I actually think there’s now more experimentation in pet food than there is in human food. People are more willing to try new ingredients, new formats. A lot of pet parents actually want new products for their pets. They want more innovation, more diversity in the diet of their pets. We’re feeding into that.”
Luprich and Eist-Holland of BeneMeat believe the way to “crack the code” is to position cultivated meat as another protein option rather than as a replacement for existing proteins. They see it “as a next option that expands choice for pet owners and manufacturers. In the near term, we believe the field will move from pilots to real products, with a broader portfolio of cultivated ingredients gradually entering pet food through established global pet food brands,” they wrote in a questionnaire about their Petfood Forum Europe presentation.
Optimism abounds
While that approach doesn’t address one of the raison d'etres for cultivated meat — the fact that demand for animal protein, for humans or pets, is fast outstripping supplies (as Ensor said, pet food is growing but meat production is not) — it may be more practical, at least in the short term. Unsurprisingly, Luprich and Eist-Holland are optimistic, evidenced by their quote starting this post. (Ensor, Kelleman and other executives from cultivated meat companies share that optimism, of course.) “The sophisticated technology will allow manufacturers to achieve better control over production, optimize nutritional profiles and pet food recipes, and design products more precisely for specific nutritional needs, sensitivities or health conditions in dogs and cats,” said the BeneMeat executives.
