Would you give your dog food that’s been grown in a lab? It sounds like something futuristic, but that future is already here – at least in the UK that is, where they’ve just started selling dog treats made from lab-grown meat.
The treats, dubbed “Chick Bites”, contain both plant-based ingredients and lab-grown meat, the latter of which has been produced by London-based company Meatly. According to its website, the meat comes from a small sample of chicken egg cells, taken from a single egg, after which no more animal products are used in the production process.
The cells are then cultivated with vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, and put into a large steel incubator – a bit like the ones that beer is made in – where the cells are given the right conditions to grow and replicate. Theoretically, this could produce an endless supply of chicken.
Meatly has said that its product is the world’s first cultivated meat for pet food to go on sale, after having gained approval to sell the lab-grown chicken in the UK in 2024, a process that required the company to show regulators that the product was both safe and nutritious.
One of the reasons some are looking to lab-grown meat products for pets in particular involves the impact of the animal product industry on climate change. In the US alone, it’s estimated that about a quarter of animal-derived product consumption can be attributed to cats and dogs, using up land and water and leading to the release of up to 64 million tons of CO2-equivalent methane and nitrous oxide. That’s a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, which is not good news for the climate.
“Cultivated meat offers a tasty, low-carbon, and healthy protein source, which has the potential to eliminate farmed animals from the pet food industry,” said Damien Clarkson, CEO and co-founder of THE PACK, the company collaborating with Meatly to produce the treats, in a statement.
However, it’s not necessarily as clear-cut a picture as it seems. Some research has suggested that, once production is scaled up, lab-grown meat could be worse for the environment than beef.
Still, research has shown that there could be a demand for it, with one study finding that even some non-meat eaters would be willing to feed their pets cultivated meat. It could be a while before owners get the chance to eat lab-grown meat though; the UK has yet to approve cultivated meat products designed for human consumption, while places like Italy, Florida, and Alabama have straight-up banned any such product.
