Is Cultivated Meat the Future of Pet Food ?

Issue #39

January 9th, 2024

Quick Hits:

🐈 Anderson Cooper, John Mayer, and a Japanese cat bar - need we say more?

🦜 This little guy can sing!

🦸‍♀️ Hero of the day! Cat saves family dog from coyotes.

🐶 Your in-home quality tester. 

🐱 These cats are Aspen-ready.

• Making history - Airvet is the first veterinary telehealth company to make a fully VCPR-compliant remote diagnosis in the state of California.

• Gallant - Just closed its Series A funding round, raising over $15M.

• New facility, who dis? - Picart, the Spanish pet brand just opened a new facility that will allow them to triple their production capacity.

• Big Investment - C&D Foods invests €48 million in facility expansion.

• Animal tech interaction - Researchers are excited about a relatively new field called animal-computer interaction.

• Hundmat - Pet MD Brands, a subsidiary of Swedencare AB, has acquired Riley's for US$7.5 million.

• 2024 Pet Care Innovation Prize Winners - Purina just announced 5 finalists that will receive $25k.

This week we interviewed Shannon Falconer, the founder of BioCraft.

What was your inspiration behind the launch of BioCraft? 

I’m an animal lover. I grew up with three cats and three dogs and stopped eating meat in my early teens for animal welfare reasons. I began volunteering with animal rescue groups during my free time and pursued biochemistry during my studies. It was when I was working as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University that I decided to leave my academic career to apply my scientific training to take animals out of the supply chain. And, given the carnivorous needs of cats and the heavy environmental toll that pet food specifically has on our planet, I decided to focus on pet food. 

Please explain what cultivated meat is and the process of developing it.

Cultivated meat is simply a collection of animal cells–and vital nutrients that those cells manufacture–that are grown outside rather than inside, or as a part of, the animal.

In one sense, the technology for growing animal cells outside of an animal has existed for decades. For nearly 50 years scientists have cultivated animal cells for disease research and a better understanding of biology. Our process is based on this long-established method.

We take a small sample from a living animal, normally from a single biopsy, or in the case of our chicken cell line, from chicken eggs. From that sample, the necessary cells are isolated and fed with vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. This happens inside a specialized vessel called a bioreactor that allows us to precisely control conditions like temperature and humidity. 

Those cells consume nutrients, grow, and divide, producing more and more cells to yield a larger and larger biomass. At harvest time, the mass is collected from the bioreactor and the process starts again.
Our proprietary IP—our secret sauce, somewhat literally—is the precise blend of nutrients we’ve formulated to nourish the cells. This is the growth medium that delivers all the essential factors that an animal would get from a healthy diet. 

Cultivated meat companies long relied on fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is derived from the slaughter of pregnant cows, to fuel cell growth. FBS is extremely expensive, not widely available, and there’s a lot of variation from one batch to another, which makes it difficult to work with from a scientific perspective. Most importantly, it’s hardly ethical or sustainable, so we developed an alternative. Not only does our growth medium eliminate all the problems of FBS, it’s far more affordable, and slashed our production costs by an order of magnitude. 

How easy/difficult has it been educating the consumer and/or brands about this new category?

A recent study reported that more than 30% of pet parents say they would feed their companion animals cultivated meat. That’s an incredible signal of consumer acceptance for something that’s not even on the market yet. With time and education, I expect that number to be even higher.

Where do you currently sell? What are the different regulatory requirements currently in place that you have to follow (in EU & US)?

Cultivated meat for cats and dogs is not currently available–neither from BioCraft nor anyone else–anywhere in the world. In the U.S., cultivated meat for pet food will be regulated by the Center for Veterinary Medicine within the FDA. We have regular check-ins with regulatory experts and officials including the CVM, who have provided us with a clear path to market in the U.S. In terms of how cultivated meat for pet food will be regulated in the EU, that is still an ongoing discussion.

You recently unveiled an artificial intelligence/machine learning tool that accelerates R&D, can you elaborate on this?

The main costs and time sinks on the way to commercialization are R&D-related. In order to accelerate our progress and to get us closer to our mission of taking animals out of the supply chain sooner, we built an AI tool that helps us to both a) fine-tune the cell proliferation process; and 2) enhance the nutritional value of our cultivated meat. AI is helping us identify and understand connections between biochemical cues (such as nutrients in our growth media) and the outcomes they elicit (such as cell growth). This information helps us greatly narrow down the hands-on experimentation we need to do in the lab, which gets us to the outcomes we want far quicker, and at far less expense. 

Why did you change the name from Because Animals to BioCraft?

The name change followed our decision to dedicate all company resources solely to developing the pet food ingredient that pet parents and pet food manufacturers are most excited about: cultivated meat. As such, in late 2022, the company discontinued its plant-based products marketed under the Because Animals brand in order to commit laser focus to bringing cultivated meat to market for cats and dogs. With this shift in focus, we felt the new name, BioCraft Pet Nutrition, was appropriate.

You are currently a B2B company, working with existing pet food manufacturers, why has that been the focus vs a B2C model?

We are a team of mission-aligned scientists working to bring the most nutritious and sustainable pet food ingredient to cats and dogs–for not only our pets, but also the planet and all the animals that inhabit it. The climate crisis our world is facing is real, and the pet food industry accounts for more than a quarter of the environmental devastation that results from animal agriculture.

Building a consumer-facing brand takes time–and our world doesn’t have that. We realized that partnering with current pet food manufacturers who a) already have the customer base, and b) are already experts in pet food manufacture will enable us to reach our mission far more quickly than if we sought to sell the finished pet food product ourselves.

How much $$ have you raised so far? 

About $10MM.

• Puppuccino - Starbucks opens its first pet-friendly store in Korea.

• XL Bully Ban - Banning XL bully dogs will not reduce the number of dog attacks, and is immoral, say industry experts.

• Movin’ on up - This dog owner’s dogs are so big, she had to move!

• NY Ban - New York state will ban pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits, effective this year.

• Welcome to the (Kennel) club - The Lancashire heeler is the latest breed recognized by the American Kennel Club.

• Pooping cash - What would you do if your dog ate $4000 in cash? This Pittsburgh family recently found out.

PAWS right there!!! Don’t forget to subscribe 👇👇

Advice for entrepreneurs with big ideas who are looking to change or shake up an industry? 

More than anything, you will need resilience and grit. If you have shaky nerves and/or aren’t comfortable with rejection, then perhaps reconsider whether being the one to “shake up an industry” is right for you.

If you could go back to when you were starting with BioCraft, what is one big thing you would have done differently?

We would have focused on cultivated meat as an ingredient from day one and not pursued, in tandem, building a consumer-facing brand. Focus is everything.

• Pawco - A former Impossible Foods employee has launched the first fully plant-based meat tailored for pet food.

• Purina - Multiple pet parents have complained of sick and dying pets. They claim it is linked to Purina.

• Recall Recall - Parrot food recalled in 20 states over salmonella concerns.

• Ranch it up - This Goldendoodle will only eat his food if his parents do this.

• Homemade - ChefPaw makes homemade food for our furry friends.

You reached the end, you deserve a treat 🍖

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Finally, What kind of photo did the turtle take on his iPhone?

A Shellfie!

See you next week!

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