On 28 May 2025, Agronomics announced that its portfolio company Meatly had built a 320-litre bioreactor for £12,500, against biopharma equipment it priced at £250,000, and had cut its culture medium to £0.22 per litre.
Those are two of the hardest input numbers anyone in cultivated meat has put on the record. We have written before about how little of this sector’s cost structure is public — four techno-economic models for precision-fermented protein, none of them sitting in the band where the industry actually operates. Against that background, a company publishing an equipment price and a medium price to two decimal places is doing something genuinely unusual.
It is also, on its own, not enough to tell you whether the business works. Fifteen months later, across every Agronomics regulatory announcement and every Meatly statement we fetched, there is still no published cost per kilogram of finished cultivated chicken. The closest thing to one is a single phrase given to a reporter in 2024: the chicken costs in the “double figures” in pounds sterling per kilogram.
That phrase spans £10 to £99. It is the difference between a business and a science project.
What was actually disclosed
| Item | Figure | Basis | Date announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meatly bioreactor | £12,500 | 320-litre vessel, designed in-house, described as patented | 28 May 2025 |
| Biopharma comparison | £250,000 | Stated as what “traditional biopharma reactors” can cost | 28 May 2025 |
| Culture medium, current | £0.22 per litre | Protein-free medium | 28 May 2025 |
| Culture medium, projected | £0.015 per litre | “at an industrial scale” — not otherwise defined numerically | 28 May 2025 |
| Series A | £10.4 million | Participants: Clean Growth Fund, Oyster Bay, JamJar Ventures, Jim Mellon, existing investors | 7 May 2026 |
| Planned facility | 20,000 litres | London; “the largest of its kind in Europe”; product launches anticipated 2027 | 7 May 2026 |
| Regulatory clearance | APHA decision | Cultivated chicken for pet food, Great Britain | 2 July 2024 |
| First commercial sale | ~750 units | “Chick Bites”, 50g pouches at £3.49, one Pets at Home store | 7 February 2025 |
The Agronomics announcement is precise about the equipment: “The newly designed 320 L equipment costs just £12.5K compared to traditional biopharma reactors, which can cost £250k, representing a 95% cost reduction.” It is equally precise about the medium: “Meatly is today announcing it has further slashed the costs of its protein-free medium to an industry-leading £0.22/L. Meatly is now in a position where, at an industrial scale, the company’s medium costs will be priced out at around £0.015/L.”
Practical consequence: if you are modelling a cultivated meat process, these are two of the only third-party-checkable input assumptions available to you in public. Use them — but use them as inputs, not as a conclusion.
One caution on the medium figure
The £0.015/L number is a projection, and the release does not attach a tonnage, a date or a facility size to “industrial scale”. The only nearby definition in the same announcement is a description of the bioreactor being built to meet the requirements “for an industrial cultivated meat facility comprising multiple 20,000L scale bioreactors” — which reads as the London plant, not as a stated production volume.
There is also a transcription problem downstream of the release worth flagging, because it will otherwise propagate. Pet Food Processing rendered the projected figure as “£0.015 (0.020¢ USD) per liter”. That USD conversion is internally inconsistent with the same article’s own conversion of £0.22 to 30¢: at that rate £0.015 is roughly 2.0¢, not 0.020¢ — a factor of one hundred. The primary Agronomics announcement gives no USD conversion at all. The error is in the secondary rendering, not in Meatly’s disclosure.
The number that is missing, and why it is not derivable
An equipment price and a medium price do not multiply out into a cost per kilogram. To get from one to the other you need, at minimum: the cell density achieved at harvest, the yield of edible biomass per litre of medium, the cycle time, the number of turns per year, the proportion of runs that fail, the downstream processing cost, labour, and the amortisation schedule on the capital. None of those is disclosed.
This matters more than it sounds. Medium at £0.22/L is only meaningful alongside how many litres are consumed per kilogram of output — a company with cheap medium and a poor yield can easily be more expensive than a company with dearer medium and a good one. The sector-wide version of this problem is one we have run into repeatedly: figures are published in units that cannot be reconciled with each other, which is exactly what made the fermentation capacity map so difficult to assemble.
Practical consequence: treat any cultivated-meat input-cost disclosure as a claim about one line of the bill of materials, not as evidence about the total. The only figure that settles the question is £/kg at the factory gate, and Meatly has not published one.
What 750 units actually was
On 7 February 2025 Meatly and brand partner The Pack sold “Chick Bites” at a single Pets at Home store in Brentford, London — 50g pouches at £3.49, with around 750 units available initially. Agronomics later confirmed the sale in its own announcement, describing it as “the world’s first cultivated pet food”.
It is a real first and it deserves to be recorded as one. It is also, in production terms, very small: at 50g a pouch, 750 units is roughly 37.5kg of finished treat — and Green Queen subsequently reported that the product contained 4% cultivated meat, which would put the cultivated chicken content at something on the order of 1.5kg. That last figure is our arithmetic from two reported inputs, not a company disclosure, and should be treated as indicative only.
The retail price implies £69.80 per kilogram of finished treat. That is not a cost, it is a launch price on a limited run at 4% inclusion, and it cannot be converted into a cost per kilogram of cultivated chicken. We mention it only because it is the one price the public can see, and it is not the price that matters.
What the Series A buys
The 7 May 2026 announcement states that Meatly “has completed a £10.4 million Series A funding round”, with participation from Clean Growth Fund, Oyster Bay, JamJar Ventures, Jim Mellon and existing investors. The stated use of funds is specific: “The new funding will support development of a 20,000-litre bioreactor facility in London, which Meatly expects to be the largest of its kind in Europe. Fit-out is expected to commence immediately, with product launches anticipated in 2027.”
Owen Ensor, Meatly’s chief executive, framed the objective in terms that are, for once, exactly the right ones: “This step will allow us to prove commercial viability at scale and start to continually produce Meatly Chicken to the UK pet food market.”
Note the word prove. The company is not claiming commercial viability at scale on the strength of the £12,500 bioreactor and the £0.22 medium. It is saying the plant is what will test it. That is a more honest position than the input figures alone might suggest, and it is the correct way to read the disclosure.
Practical consequence: the testable claim here is 2027 product launches from a 20,000-litre London facility. That is the date to hold the company to, not the input costs.
The counter-argument
The case against making much of the missing £/kg is straightforward, and it is decent.
First, at pre-commercial volumes a cost per kilogram is close to meaningless. It is dominated by the amortisation of fixed costs across tiny output, and would make almost any early manufacturer look ruinous. Publishing it would inform nobody and mislead many.
Second, £/kg is competitively sensitive in a way that an equipment price is not. A company can disclose that it built a cheap bioreactor without telling a rival anything actionable; disclosing its landed cost per kilogram tells every competitor and every buyer exactly where it sits.
Third — and this cuts against the whole genre of comparison — costs disclosed by different companies are rarely on the same basis. GFI’s own analysis of cultivated meat techno-economic work notes that data gaps persist and that assumptions may change as the industry matures. A £/kg figure without a stated boundary (does it include downstream? media recycling? facility overhead?) can be worse than no figure at all.
All three points are fair. None of them changes the practical position of somebody trying to decide whether cultivated pet food is a real category: the input disclosures narrow the uncertainty, and they do not close it.
What we could not establish
- Any Meatly cost per kilogram of finished cultivated chicken. We are recording this as a confirmed absence rather than a research gap: no fetched Agronomics announcement or Meatly statement combines its disclosed input costs into a £/kg figure. The only characterisation found anywhere is the “double figures” phrase, reported in July 2024.
- A numerical definition of “industrial scale” for the £0.015/L medium projection — no tonnage, no date, no throughput.
- Any production volume beyond the initial ~750-unit Chick Bites run. We found no subsequent volume disclosure.
- Whether total funding raised to date is £17.5m or £17.4m. The May 2026 announcement says the Series A brought “its total funding to £17.5 million”; FoodManufacture and Tech Funding News both say £17.4 million. The May 2025 announcement states that “To date, Meatly has raised £7m”, which added to the £10.4 million Series A gives £17.4 million — so the arithmetic favours the lower figure and £17.5 million looks like a rounding. We have not relied on either number in the analysis above.
- The fund’s exact name. The Agronomics announcement says “JamJar Ventures”; every secondary report says “JamJar Investments”.
- Any independent technical assessment of whether Meatly’s bioreactor and medium figures are comparable to others in the sector. We looked specifically for named, on-the-record scepticism directed at these figures and did not find any. Absence of published criticism is not endorsement.
What to watch
Three claims here are testable, and we intend to check them.
- Fit-out of the 20,000-litre London facility, said on 7 May 2026 to be commencing immediately. Construction start dates in this sector have a poor record — the Liberation Labs plant we tracked was three years past groundbreaking with no confirmed commercial start.
- Product launches in 2027. Stated, dated, and falsifiable.
- Whether the £0.015/L medium projection survives contact with a real plant. Projected input costs at unbuilt scale are the single most reliably optimistic number in manufacturing.
The wider point is not about Meatly, which has disclosed more than most of its peers and should get credit for it. It is that the disclosure culture in cultivated meat has settled on publishing the inputs that are falling and staying quiet about the output that decides the outcome. Believer Meats had full FDA and USDA clearance and $390 million raised when it ran out of money. Approval was not the constraint. Neither is the price of a bioreactor.