On the latest episode of the Trending: Pet Food podcast, Owen Ensor, co-founder and CEO of Meatly, joined host Lindsay Beaton, editor of Petfood Industry, to discuss the evolving cultivated meat market.
Ensor shared insights on the science behind growing real meat without animals, the technical and economic challenges of scaling production, and what the future holds for this emerging protein source in pet food.
Meatly became the first company in Europe to sell cultivated meat when it launched in the UK for pet food this year. According to Ensor, the company has dramatically reduced production costs — dropping culture medium costs from £700 (US$952) per liter to 22 pence (US$0.30) per liter — and patented low-cost bioreactors that are 15 times cheaper than traditional models.
Ensor explained that while cultivated meat is now sold in several markets for human food, including the U.S., Singapore and Australia, the industry is still producing small quantities and faces a five-year timeline before significant market presence.
Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from EPISODE 103: What is the status of the cultivated meat market?
1. Cultivated meat offers a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture.
Ensor explained that cultivated meat is "a process where you take cells from an animal or from an egg. At Meatly, we're focused on chicken and we take a single sample of cells from one egg one time, and then we can create an infinite amount of meat forevermore and we use less land, less water, fewer CO2 emissions. We don't use any antibiotics or steroids or hormones."
2. The technology has pharmaceutical roots but requires dramatic economic restructuring for food applications.
"A lot of the technology came from the biopharmaceutical space," Ensor said. "It's used to make vaccine production or cellular therapies. That entire industry is very low volume, very high margin products. We needed to flip that quite dramatically into very high volume, very low margin food products. That has been the fundamental challenge."
3. Meatly has achieved dramatic cost reductions in key production components.
The company reduced culture medium costs £700 (US$952) per liter to 22 pence (US$0.30) per liter, according to Ensor. Additionally, Meatly "patented our own low-cost bioreactors, as they're known. They're about 15 times cheaper than traditional bioreactors."
4. Pet food offers a more pragmatic entry point than human food.
"I think pet food has been an incredible starting point for us," Ensor said. "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."
5. Scaling mammalian cells presents unique technical challenges.
Ensor explained that mammalian cells don't have a cell wall, making them fragile. "One of the main challenges is around shear stress," he noted. "You need to rotate the bioreactor. You need to make sure the media is equally distributed. In rotating the impeller in a bioreactor, you can burst all of the cells."
6. Production scaling is limited to 20,000-liter vessels, requiring horizontal expansion.
"Our aim is to go to 20,000 liters, optimize the process there, hit good yields and good price points, and then start building industrial facilities," Ensor said. The company plans to scale out with multiple vessels rather than scaling up to the massive 300,000-liter vessels used in traditional fermentation industries.
7. Pet food manufacturers face meat supply constraints that cultivated meat can address.
"A lot of pet food manufacturers we speak to actually say we want to grow faster, we see more opportunity, but we don't know where we can get enough meat, particularly high quality, traceable, consistent, safe meat products," Ensor said. "Cultivated meat is done in sterility. There's really the lowest possible risk of Salmonella, E. coli, which leads to product recalls, health issues, brand issues."
8. Consumer acceptance requires transparency and education.
"Broadly, consumers are interested, but uncertain," Ensor observed. The company's approach is to be very transparent. "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."
9. Market availability remains five years away for significant presence.
"It is still probably at least five years before you start seeing significant presence of cultivated meat in our restaurants, on our plates, and in our pet food," Ensor said. "The immediate challenge is proving that we can economically produce this at scale in a commercially competitive way."
10. Initial products will offer cultivated meat as one option among traditional proteins.
"We will put it alongside," explained Ensor. "Many companies have a range and they have as part of that chicken and salmon and beef and lamb, and then they'll add cultivated chicken. It'll just be another option. We're not going to force this on consumers. We're not going to try and sneak it in anywhere. We're going to be very open. We're going to be very labeled. It's going to be very clear."
