Meat is a beautiful thing for pet health, but its creation comes with a host of environmental challenges to satiate its demand. Additionally, the procurement of meat brings with it an array of supply chain risks related to inconsistent nutritional specifications, shortages, and pricing fluctuations.

Emerging technologies in food and ag show promise to mitigate many of these issues, and provide manufacturers and pet parents with new ways to deliver high quality nutrition to their pets. The ultimate success of these technologies goes beyond solving for foundational regulatory, R&D and scale-up processes. Getting the world to embrace new ingredient and food concepts will also be critical to their success.

We’ll share some data and perspective from Bond’s journey and research, that the industry can take to heart.

Bond Pet Foods is a Boulder, Colorado-based company using biotechnology to create meat proteins that are nutritionally comparable to their conventional counterparts but without all the bad stuff- so people, pets, farm animals and the planet all win. Using some of the same processes that are employed in craft brewing, Bond produces high-quality animal proteins through fermentation, harvests them to better meet the nutritional requirements of companion animals, and supplies the ingredients to manufacturers for pet food, treat and supplement applications.

On the development curve, insect, cultured and fermented protein offerings are still (largely) in their infancy. With that, a significant amount of work has yet to be advanced in a number of areas (regs, longitudinal feeding studies, high-volume industrial production, consumer/market positioning).

While development challenges are often tied to their corresponding technologies, similar pain points exist on the path to market.

My hope is that more companies leading the way in alt protein, whenever possible, share more on what they’re learning with their critical workstreams – and/or there’s greater collaboration with global manufacturers (leveraging their expertise) to accelerate a better pet food future.

At Bond, we have a partnership with Hill’s Pet Nutrition to create and produce craft animal proteins for their portfolio, in addition to other manufacturers that haven’t publicly been announced.