The hype around cultivated meat — where animal cells are grown in a lab into meat created without harming living beings — has been around for years. But until this summer, no cultivated meat products had been granted for sale by Europe’s regulatory bodies.
That first company — and so far, the only company — was UK startup Meatly, which became the first company in Europe to have a cultivated meat ingredient for sale and the first company in the world to get regulatory clearance to sell pet food made from cultivated meat in July.
While Owen Ensor, the CEO and founder of Meatly, told Sifted the pet food sector is ripe for planet-friendly alternatives, he also noted a deliberate strategy: focusing on non-human consumption as one way to get around the pressures of regulations and varied consumer perceptions of cultivated meat.
Meatly isn’t the only one — and innovations in pet food span beyond cultivated meat to food made out of fungi and even insects. In our new podcast series, sponsored by Unleashed by Purina, we asked three pet food startups working on different innovations about their tech and their strategies to market.
In the first episode of The oppawtunity, you’ll hear from Simo Ellilä, the CEO and cofounder of Finnish startup Enifer, which is working on fungi-based protein using fermentation, Pernilla Westergren, founder of Swedish startup Petgood, which is working on insect-based pet food, and Lou Kutzler, the director of food science and innovation at UMAMI Bioworks, a Singapore-based company making cultivated seafood for human and pet consumption.
Listen to the full episode — and subscribe to the series — here.
This podcast is sponsored by Unleashed by Purina. It is hosted and produced by Steph Bailey, edited by Billy Craigon and managed by Tanya Maheshwari.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/pet-tech-alternative-meats-brnd/
