Petfood made from lab-grown meat to be available in the UK next year

Lab-grown meat as a sustainable alternative to farmed livestock has been heralded as a future development for several years now. The prospect of it becoming a reality has increased in recent years thanks to billions of dollars of venture capital funding pouring into start-ups pursuing the scientific techniques to make lab-grown meat a reality.

Reports today suggest lab-grown meat could now be available for purchase in the UK in 18 months, which means before the end of 2023. But it won’t be us biting into a burger or Bolognese sauce made from cultivated meat. Rather, it will be our furry friends who try it first.

AIM-listed Agronomics, a venture capital company focused on opportunities within the field of cellular agriculture, has announced a joint venture with Roslin Technologies, the Edinburgh-based institute behind Dolly the cloned sheep. The partnership will see Agronomics and Roslin create a new business, Good Dog Food, which will sell pet food made from meat but not containing meat from slaughtered livestock. Or any animal in the conventional sense.

Good Dog Food will cultivate mince, which is achieved by taking a biopsy from an animal and then replicating muscle and fat cells in protein-rich nutrients. The result should be tissue that is an exact replica of the meat of the animal the cells were taken from. The cellular agriculture techniques the new company will employ are expected to take around 40 days and result in around 3000kg of meat.

3000kg of standard beef would represent 7 or 8 cows consuming significant food and water resources, and emitting methane, for around 28 months. At that point they would be slaughtered.

With as much as 20% of the farmed meat produced on the planet is consumed by pets. In the U.S. alone dog and cat food is estimated to result in the equivalent of 65 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year. Taking away those emissions would make a considerable dent in sustainability targets related to greenhouse gases.

Agronomics executive director Jim Mellon, who is also now chairman of Good Dog Food commented on the joint venture with:

“An untapped sector of the agricultural market is the production of pet food via cellular agriculture. We are delighted to be able to announce our first joint venture in the cultivated meat field, to focus on the production of cultivated pet food. As a dog owner I have been looking for high-quality meat alternatives to provide to my dogs.”

Mr Mellon is also hopeful one side effect of the venture is that it

“may accelerate the introduction of cultivated meat to the broader public.”

On behalf of the other half of the joint venture, Roslin Technologies’ chief executive Ernst van Orsouw stated:

“Combining our joint passion for a more sustainable world and our unique complementary expertise will allow Good Dog Food to become the global leader in cultivated meat-based pet food.”

The start-up believes it can have a product on the shelves within 18 months and will soon start speaking to retailers about stocking it.

The Agronomics share price is up by over 18% since last week when the joint venture was announced.

Agronomics is valued at £176.1 million on London’s junior market. It has made investments in other cultivated meat businesses, SuperMeat and Geltor, and Onego, a protein fermentation business that use microbes to produce dairy proteins to make milk without cows.