Bone appétit! Dog treats from lab-grown meat are hitting the U.K. market

LONDON — Last summer, the United Kingdom became the first country in Europe to legalize lab-grown meat, starting with pet food.

On Friday, it will hit the shelves.

The manufacturer is called Meatly, and its product is called Chick Bites — a type of dog treat. But Chick Bites are made without ever involving a chicken. Instead, cells taken from one chicken egg are cultivated in a lab and then combined with plant-based ingredients. The company says the result is “just as tasty and nutritious as traditional chicken breast.”

Meatly, based in London, calls itself the first company in the world to supply cultivated meat for pet food. It claims its single sample from egg cells, multiplied in a lab, is capable of producing enough protein “to feed pets forever.”

Cultivated meat — sometimes called “no kill” meat — is seen as more ethical and environmentally friendly, although the cultivated meat industry does contribute to CO2 emissions, given that its production facilities rely on electricity.

Compared to traditional beef farming, making cultivated meat uses 45% less energy, and if its manufacture is powered with renewables, it can emit up to 92% less greenhouse gases, use 95% less land and 78% less water, according to estimates by the European Environment Agency. (Beef production, a top source of methane emissions and an activity that requires large areas of grazing land, has an environmental impact far greater than that of chicken production).

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the sale of lab-grown meat for human consumption in the United States. Singapore and Israel have also approved it.

No European Union country has done so. Austria, France and Italy have all lodged concerns with the E.U. And no country in the world has approved lab-grown meat for pets except the U.K.

Chick Bites come in a pale blue resealable plastic pack with a cartoon of a dog waving a flag that says: “Puptivists changing the world.”

In an email to NPR, Meatly CEO Owen Ensor said Chick Bites are on sale for £3.49 (about $4.35) a pack. That’s in the middle price range for dog treats for sale on the website of Pets At Home, the U.K. pet supply retailer that’s slated to begin selling Chick Bites on Friday.

“Around 20% of all the meat that is consumed by higher pet-owning nations — and that would include the U.K. — is actually consumed by pets, not people,” Andrew Knight, professor of veterinary science at the University of Winchester, told the BBC.

When people talk about the environmental impact of meat, Knight said, “They’ve always been focusing on human diets.”

“Actually, pets are a really big part of this picture as well,” he said.

A 2022 survey by U.K. researchers, published in the PLOS ONE journal, found that 32.5% of respondents said they were willing to eat cultivated meat themselves. A much higher percentage, 47.3%, said they were willing to feed it to their pets.

Even though Austria has not approved lab-grown meat for any consumption — human or pet — a Vienna-based company called BioCraft Pet Nutrition says it is cultivating mouse, rabbit and chicken meat in a lab, “because cats and dogs absolutely love them.”

Whether that is true won’t be clear until these products reach their intended market.