Company: Meatly
Location: London
Founded: 2022
Founders: Owen Ensor (CEO) and Helder Cruz (CSO)
Written by: Sandeep Mangrati
Edited by: Caroline Babisz and Natasha Barrow
Cultivated or cultured meat is an exciting technology that provides an alternative to traditional farmed, animal meat. It has various advantages in environmental impact, animal welfare, and more. Meatly is a start-up producing cultivated, lab-grown meat and what sets them apart is that they specialise in producing pet food. The idea to target pet food specifically was attractive for a few reasons. First, the regulations for cultivated pet food are less strict than for human consumption, therefore approval would likely take less time. Second, it is significantly cheaper to produce cultivated meat for pets and requires less processing.
Cultivated meat is produced from animal cells in a lab, without needing to raise or slaughter animals. These cells are proliferated in lab conditions to grow into edible meat. The production process at Meatly involved testing various cell lines under different growth conditions and adapting the top candidates in serum-free media since serum increases cost of manufacturing and has potential health risks, not to mention harvesting serum is a significant ethical concern. Following this, the team adapted the cells to grow in a suspension culture, which is much more amenable to scaling and meeting production demands than adherent cells. At Meatly, the researchers have successfully scaled up from typical shake flasks to large 50 litre stirred-tank bioreactors. They are also developing a perfusion approach (wherein growth media is continuously replenished) which can vastly increase yields compared to fed-batch production (media is replaced in batch mode). Following its recent approval, Meatly’s aim is to scale up even further in stainless steel bioreactors, pursuing hundreds or thousands of litres per batch.
After cultivating the cells in these large bioreactors, the biomass is separated from the culture media by centrifuging the culture. Currently, this is an inefficient process, both because it is slow and very manual, and because a significant percentage of biomass is lost. Therefore, researchers at Meatly are aiming to improve the harvesting process via a proprietary method.
Helder Cruz has a strong background in animal cell technology through his PhD in Biotechnology-Biochemical Engineering and his post-doctoral career, including founding previous companies, Theraproteins, focused on production of recombinant proteins and ECBio cellular therapies. Using this prior knowledge and experience, Helder decided to redirect his focus towards the cultivated meat industry. He understood that the key challenge in the field of cultivated meat is to reduce cost, particularly during scale up.
“Everything about animal cell technology is expensive, sophisticated, and complex. And we need to go from grams of biomass to tonnes. To do this affordably is the key challenge.”
To make the dream of cultivated meat affordable and accessible, Helder together with Owen Ensor (CEO) co-founded Meatly. Owen has prior experience in the protein industry where he scaled the production of insect feed for chicken from small, lab scale to a 15 million USD industrial plant.
In May 2022, Helder and Owen started Meatly in the Scale Space White City tech incubator and now have 11 team members.
Meatly has been very successful in their endeavour and they became the first company to gain approval to sell cultivated meat in Europe, following the Animal & Plant Health Agency (APHA) decision early July. Following this huge milestone, they are planning on increasing their manufacturing capacity and are aiming to set up a pilot facility by next year up to thousands of litres (from their current 50 L scales). They also aim to further decrease costs such that it can be sold at the same price per kg as traditional chicken meat. The researchers at Meatly are continuously trying to find ways to increase yields and decrease costs and to do this, they are in the process of developing novel bioreactors and harvesting methods. These kinds of innovations are critical for advancing the field and have been the key to success for Meatly.
Many congratulations to Meatly and their team!
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