First lab-grown meat treats go on sale in the UK — for dogs

Cultivated chicken doggie snacks have gone on sale at a U.K. pet food retailer, Pets at Home. The retailer also happens to be a major investor in Meatly, the startup producing the meat ingredient contained in dog food brand The Pack’s Chick Bites, as the slaughter-free, low-carbon treats are billed. (Other ingredients in the snacks are plant-based.)

Meatly is claiming a world-first for retailing cultivated meat for pet food, as The Guardian reports. The company gained regulatory clearance for the use case last summer — claiming a European first. Chick Bites are its first foray into commercializing Meatly Chicken, its name for the meat it’s growing in bioreactors, after a one-time harvest of cells from a single chicken egg. But it has big plans to scale up.

While this first doggie snack is a “limited release,” suggesting production capacity is still capped, Meatly said its next steps will focus on scaling production and making products “more widely available to consumers.”