Friends & Family Pet Food Co is partnering with Novel Farms to launch sustainable cultivated meat pet food for dogs and cats by 2025!
California’s Friends & Family Pet Food Co., a startup developing feed options with sustainable proteins, is collaborating with Novel Farms, a cell ag startup also based in California, to introduce cultivated meat products for dogs and cats.
Reportedly, the companies are in the testing and prototyping stages, aiming for a product line launch in 2025, targeting the San Francisco Bay Area. The resulting pet food products will combine cultivated meat with plant-based ingredients, mirroring the approach used by cultivated meat companies.
Friends & Family has also partnered with Singapore’s UMAMI Bioworks to create cultivated seafood treats for cats enriched with high-value microalgae and essential nutrients for healthier diets.
Moving from factory-farmed animal protein
Joshua Errett (CEO, formerly of Because, Animals), Jonny Cruz, and Sarah Dodd founded Friends & Family Pet Food Co. in Oakland in 2023 to bring alternative proteins to the pet food aisle. The company targets Gen Z and Millennial pet parents with products that ensure pets’ health and well-being while focusing on sustainability. The startup was part of the ProVeg Incubator’s 12th cohort.
“We want to move from factory-farmed animal protein to sustainable, humane ingredients by commercializing cultivated & other sustainable protein pet foods,” the company states on its website.
Novel Farms was founded in 2020 by Nieves Martinez Marshall and Michelle Lu to cultivate pork, including Jamón Iberico. The company has developed a proprietary microbial fermentation process to produce 3D bioscaffolds to co-culture fat and muscle cells cost-effectively at scale.
According to Novel Farms, traditional scaffolding methods are expensive, not scalable, and ineffective. Its scaffolding technology aims to overcome these obstacles with a tunable solution that reduces manufacturing costs and enables structuring for cell-based meat while enhancing its taste and texture.
In 2022, Novel Farms raised $1.4 million in a pre-seed funding round, unveiling what it claimed to be the “world’s first” marbled cultivated pork loin. The Canadian cell ag platform CULT Food Science is an investor in Novel Farms.
CULT Food Science also owns Noochies!, a pet food brand that is also innovating in the industry with yeast proteins and aims to launch a cultivated pet food product. Noochies recently introduced Sprinkles, a line for dogs and cats targeting specific health concerns. It is formulated with the brand’s functional ingredients: Bmmune, a high-protein nutritional yeast, and Bflora, a probiotic ingredient said to support gut health and digestion.
Original source: https://vegconomist.com
https://www.animalagricultureclimatechange.org/the-future-of-pet-food/
