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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pet Food

Wild Earth Launches Cell-Based Pet Food As It Raises a Fresh $23 Million

Plant-based pet food brand Wild Earth has announced plans to expand its product line into pet food made with cell-based meat. The announcement comes on the heels of a new $23 million funding round from a group of investors that includes Mark Cuban and the star of Vampire Diaries, Paul Wesley.

Led by alternative protein entrepreneur and investor Ryan Bethencourt, Wild Earth has been one of the early leaders in creating pet food from plant-based ingredients. With products like Clean Protein dog food (which uses pea and potato protein) and Superfood Dog Treats With Koji (Koji is a fungi protein used in fermented food in Asia), company sales have grown more than 700% year over year, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

And now, the company plans to use cell-based meat in a new line of products. From the release:

(Wild Earth) has its sights set on adding new products and launching a new initiative into cell-based meat pet food to deepen their market share and gain new customers. Cell-based meat is a lab-grown meat; a sustainable alternative to traditional meat. Cell-based meat is cruelty-free to produce. Cell-based meat is the future of meat, and pet food is leading the revolution!

The company got a boost in 2019 when Bethencourt appeared on Shark Tank and secured a $550 thousand investment from Cuban. Bethencourt, already well-known in the alternative protein space as one of the earliest employees at seminal biotech accelerator IndieBio, became an influential alt-protein evangelist and helped increase Wild Earth’s profile in the market.

Wild Earth is just one of a number of pet food companies eyeing cell-based meat as an ingredient. Startup Because Animals is working on cat food with meat made from mice cells which it plans to have in the market by 2022. Boulder-based Bond Pet Foods has sourced chicken cells from a heritage hen named Inga and plans to roll out pet food using cultured chicken meat in 2023.

And now, we can add cell-based beef and seafood to the list of ingredients coming to the cell-based pet food market. According to the release, Wild Earth plans to have its new lineup of pet food with beef, chicken, and seafood cell-based meat inputs on the market in 2022.

You can see highlights from Bethencourt’s appearance on Shark Tank in the video below:

Mark Cuban invests in vegan dog food company Wild Earth

Bond Pet Foods Creates Cultured Chicken Protein Prototype for Pet Nutrition

Don’t worry, animal lovers: No chickens (and by chickens we mean Inga the hen) were hurt in the creation of this dog food.

That’s according to Bond Pet Foods, who announced this week that the company has created what it claims to be the “world’s first cultured chicken meat protein for pet food applications.”

According to the announcement, the company took a “one-time blood sample – in this case, from a heritage hen named Inga who is alive and well at a farm in Lindsborg, Kansas – to determine the genetic code for the best types of chicken proteins to nourish dogs and cats.”

From there, the company’s scientists coupled the genetic code with food grade yeast in a fermentation tank. The end result was animal protein, which Bond’s culinary team used as a novel ingredient in a baked pet treat. The company then tested it with a handful of dogs at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

Bond said that once fully developed, its fermented chicken protein will have the same primary nutrients as conventionally produced chicken meat.

Looking forward, the company hopes to scale up its prototype and plans to work towards bringing products to market based on this new cultured protein by 2023. To help fund this growth, the company also announced they’d closed a bridge round of financing with follow-on from the company’s original seed investors.

While it’s easy for most of us to think of conventionally farmed animal alternatives for human consumption since we see the end product on our plates, the pet food industry is also a massive consumer of factory farmed animal meat. According to a report from iFeeder and the Pet Food Institute, nearly 3.8 million tons of animal-derived ingredients were used in dog and cat food in the US in 2018. Because of this, a new generation of science-forward pet food startups have cropped up in recent years to create new sources of protein for our pets.

In addition to Bond, Wild Earth has developed a line up of pet food with plant-derived protein in the form of a fungi called Koji, while Because Animals, a startup creating both plant-based and cultured protein-based pet food, has already created a cultured-mouse meat prototype for cats.

All of this innovation in pet food protein hopefully means a future where not only our Fido and Felix are happy, but is also good news for the Ingas of the world.