.png?w=1920&h=1080)
For decades, commercial pet food has relied on a basic formula: meat from industrial supply chains, processed at high heat, and then fortified with supplements to make up for lost or inconsistent nutrients.
That model worked for a very long time – more than 70 years – and is still in use today.
But much has changed in 70 years, including how we view our pets. As we like to say, our pets are now friends and family – and we feed them accordingly.
Meat is the heart of pet nutrition. Cats evolved eating it, and for both cats and dogs, it’s the only single food source that provides complete nutrition in the wild. So we try our best to give pets the best meat available.
And that is where cultivated meat shines. It has the potential to be not only the best meat for cats and dogs, but the only meat our animals need.
Here's a side-by-side comparison:
Conventional Meat vs. Cultivated Meat in Pet Food
| Quality | Conventional meat | Cultivated meat |
| Nutrition | Nutrients can be lost in the processing steps. Rendering, high-heat or pressure processing and bacterial "kill" steps can damage or destroy delicate vitamins, fatty acids and amino acids in meat, that then must be added back in. | Because cultivated meat is sourced from a controlled environment and delivered fresh to our pet food facilities, we skip all that intense processing. |
| Consistency | Byproduct, meal and lower-grade cuts from industrial farms vary in nutrients. They also are hard to trace – meaning different parts and even species of animals can enter meals. Pet manufactures must supplement the meat to even out the product's nutritional panel to meet standards. | Every batch is single-origin animal protein and designed and tested for nutritional precision. |
| Supplementation | As mentioned above, some of what makes meat great for pets is damaged or destroyed by processing. Some of those nutrients are essential. So they are added back, post-processing, via a powdered mix of sythetic and isolated nutrients. | Our goal is to create a new system of nutrition where the only ingredient on a label is cultivated meat – complete and balanced without supplementation! |
| Safety | Rearing animals at such a massive scale requires a lot of human intervention. Pharmaceuticals, sometimes antibiotics, hormones, amputations – much is done to these animals to keep them disease-free in close quarters. | We produce in controlled environments, without relying on antibiotics or animal pharmaceuticals. We are GMO-free as well. |
Conventional pet food, made from conventional meat, has done wonders for the healthspan of cats and dogs. Kibble is the reason you don't see dogs with Ricketts, for instance. The model has worked, for a long time.
But the time has come to improve the system. Cultivated meat is the platform to build the next generation of pet nutrition on.