In the US’ food-obsessed landscape, the quickest route to a new idea is to look for something already being done — and then make it vegan. Wild Earth Inc, a start-up based in Berkeley, California, is doing that to pet food with lab-created proteins. Translated, that means fake meat for Fido.
The stakes are far from small potatoes. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own four-legged friends, 184 million dogs and cats to be precise. To feed this mass of tail-wagging companions, they spend almost US$30 billion annually. Pet food — predominantly animal-meat products — represents as much as 30 percent of all meat consumption in the US.
If US pets were to establish a sovereign nation, it would rank fifth in global meat consumption, according to a study by UCLA professor Gregory Okin.
Photo: AP
This nation of pooches and kitties consumes about 19 percent as many calories as humans, but because their diets are higher in protein, their total animal-derived calorie intake amounts to about 33 percent that of humans.
“If you’re feeding your large dog the same as you, your dog is eating more meat than you are,” said Cailin Heinze, a Tufts faculty member and board-certified veterinary nutritionist.
Food consumption by dogs and cats is responsible for releasing up to 58 million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year. Developing fake meat for pets might help put a dent in that, as well as the use of water and land needed to breed all that livestock. In doing so, the industry might pave the way toward replacing all the real meat in your fridge, too.
As global human population approaches 8 billion, “the opportunity here is to create something that is safe and sustainable, ” Wild Earth co-founder Ron Shigeta said.
First, they are starting with your pets. With US$4 million in seed money, Wild Earth hopes to be the first pet food brand based on cellular agriculture. In 2013, Shigeta and co-founder Ryan Bethencourt started Berkeley Biolabs, followed by Indie Bio — a Bay Area synthetic biology accelerator — before getting into pet food, which, like products for human consumption, has tilted ever-more toward higher nutritional value.
The initial product Wild Earth plans to sell from its direct-to-consumer Web site is a koji-based dog treat.
That is a lucrative choice, apparently, as the American Pet Products Association said dogs are given more treats than any other pet species.
Market research firm Kerry Inc reported that 34 percent of new product development for pet food last year was in treats.
Bethencourt compared his company’s production of “clean” protein to that of sake, right down to using the same ingredient to fuel its protein growth.
Koji, a fungus, is the Japanese version of baker’s yeast. It grows rapidly inside tanks, along with sugar and nutrients, at the right balmy temperature.
The result is a plant-based protein with a close match to eggs or animal-based meat. Because koji is widely consumed by humans, it already has a “generally recognized as safe” designation. Wild Earth’s supply chain is simple — it uses only a handful of ingredients — and easily traceable.
“Now that millennials have officially taken the reins as the primary demographic of pet owners, they stand to further develop the humanization-of-pets trend,” association president Bob Vetere said in its annual pet survey.
A lot of that has to do with the environment and an increased emphasis on nutrition, but that is not all there is to it.
So far this year, there have been recalls in the US due to listeria, salmonella and pentobarbital contamination. The J.M. Smucker Co, which makes Gravy Train and Kibbles ’N Bits, as well as a private label food for Wal-Mart Inc, had to voluntarily recall its dog food when traces of pentobarbital were found.
Use of fake meat might obviate risks associated with supply chains that rely on meat scraps.
The pet food space these days is red-hot. General Mills Inc was so eager to get into the business that in February it paid US$8 billion to acquire Blue Buffalo.
Meanwhile, Mars Petcare US has launched the Companion Fund, a US$100 million venture fund to invest in the pet industry.
However, for cutting-edge pet food born in the lab, hurdles await. To date, no cellular meat company — Memphis Meat, Just, Finless Foods Inc, among other — has found a way to create meat from scratch in a scalable, affordable way.
Thirty-one percent of dog and cat owners already complain about the cost of pet food, the association said.
There’s also the “ick” factor of meat made in labs, even when we are talking about our pets, let alone when we eventually might eat it ourselves.
With pet food products ranging from offal to insects to alligators, who is to say vegan cannot join the mix?
Bethencourt and Shigeta contend that “cellular agriculture has the unique potential to rebuild the supply chain from farm-to-table.”
Marion Nestle, author of several books on pet food, is skeptical.
“The operative word is ‘potential,’” she said. “Let’s see how it works in practice.”
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