The facility will be built and operated by pet food producer Meatly, whose products are exclusively derived from cultivated meat.
Lab-grown meat is real animal meat that is derived from animal cells directly. Although such products have been produced using standard cell culture dishes and stacked flasks for taste testing, growing cultivated meat at scale requires bioreactors in volumes up to or beyond several thousands of litres.
Meatly’s 20,000‑litre pilot site will be funded by a £10.4 million Series A round, backed by three new institutional investors: Oyster Bay Venture Capital, Clean Growth Fund, and JamJar Investments.
This latest raise will aim to build on the £7 million in seed funding provided by founding investors Agronomics and Pets at Home, bringing total funding raised to date to £17.4 million.
As reported in Food Manufacture last year, Meatly is the first company in Europe to sell cultivated meat commercially, having secured UK regulatory authorisation in 2024, which was followed by a real‑world retail trial in 2025.
Meatly says the development of the site will mark a “pivotal step” in the cultivated meat sector’s transition from R&D to industrial scale. Fit‑out of the facility will begin immediately, with product releases expected in 2027.
“This investment marks a powerful endorsement, not just of Meatly, but of Britain’s foodtech and biotech sectors,” said Meatly CEO, Owen Ensor.
“Meatly has one focus – to make commercially viable cultivated meat a reality. Over the last four years, Meatly’s pioneering team has systematically focused on reducing key costs and building the strongest possible technical foundation for growth. Now we have our own industry‑leading technology, and we are ready to scale.”
He added: “This step will allow us to prove commercial viability at scale and start to continually produce Meatly Chicken for the UK pet food market.”
Founded in 2022, Meatly claims to have “solved” the key technical cost challenges facing the cultivated meat industry.
In 2024, it reduced the cost of its chemically defined protein‑free medium to what it calls an “industry‑leading” £0.22/l (per litre), and in 2025 it announced it had cut the cost of bioreactors by around 10 times.
Elise Schumacher, an investor at Oyster Bay Venture Capital, commented: “Cultivated meat is emerging as one of the most sustainable and ethical ways to produce meat today. From advancing the science to early retail sales for pets, Meatly has shown a clear ability to move from concept to real‑world application, with the foundations to scale across Europe and globally.
“Having built and grown some of the most successful food businesses ourselves, we know what it takes – and this is exactly the kind of company we like to back. Owen Helder and the Meatly team are doing the right things early and are primed to make a meaningful difference to both the planet and in transforming the food ecosystem for the better.”
