Meatly builds Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility in London

Meatly has begun work on a London pilot plant that it says will eventually hold 20,000 litres of bioreactor capacity, a scale that would make it the largest cultivated meat facility in Europe. The timing matters as much as the number: the company started fit-out less than two weeks after closing a £10.4 million Series A, turning a long-running funding story into physical infrastructure.

The raise brought Meatly’s total funding to £17.4 million, including £7 million in earlier seed backing from Agronomics and Pets at Home. For a sector that has often been stronger on deck slides than stainless steel, the new site is a concrete test of whether cultivated meat can move from lab credibility to factory discipline. Meatly is building for repeatable output, not just proof of concept, and the London plant is intended to support a planned 2027 launch in UK pet food.

That strategy has been deliberately practical. Meatly says it brought its chemically defined, protein-free growth medium down to £0.22 per litre in 2024, then cut bioreactor costs by about 10x in 2025. Those are the kinds of numbers that matter when the industry talks about scale, because the central question is not whether cultivated meat can be made at all, but whether it can be made reliably and economically enough to leave the pilot stage behind.

The company’s regulatory footing gives the project extra weight. On 17 July 2024, Meatly announced UK clearance to sell cultivated meat for pet food after working with the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Animal and Plant Health Agency. Meatly says that made it the first company in the world to receive regulatory clearance for cultivated meat to be sold as pet food.

That clearance was followed by a very visible commercial step. On 7 February 2025, Meatly and THE PACK launched limited-release Chick Bites at Pets at Home in Brentford, London, with Meatly saying it became the first company in the world to supply cultivated meat for pet food on sale. Pets at Home said it was the first retailer globally to sell pet food made from cultivated meat, linking the category’s sustainability pitch to real shelves, real buyers and now, soon, a much larger production footprint.

Meatly was founded in 2022 and was previously known as Good Dog Food. With Owen Ensor and Helder Cruz at the helm, the London build-out is more than a capacity upgrade. It is a signal that cultivated meat in Europe is finally being measured in plant footage, bioreactor volume and regulatory execution, not just ambition.