It’s a cruel world, but a new Berkeley start-up bodes to make it just bit kinder and gentler. Wild Earth, a company spearheaded by biohacking wunderkind Ryan Bethencourt, is working up a line of fungus-based pet foods. It’s the kind of venture, perhaps, that lends itself to some Anthony Bourdain-like lampooning: in the Bay Area bubble, it’s not enough that you don’t want to eat anything with a face. You don’t want your dog to do any face-eating either.
But Wild Earth isn’t about holier-than-thou veganism, insists Bethencourt. Standard pet foods, he says, are simply unhealthy, both for pets and the planet.
“Pet food accounts for between 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of the meat industry,” Bethencourt says. “We want to change that.”
“Typical pet foods incorporate meat from diseased animals—animals with tumors or infectious diseases,” Bethencourt says. “They also can be contaminated with E. coli and salmonella.”
And in a potential Soylent Green twist, Bethencourt observes, some pet foods have tested positive for pentobarbital, a euthanasia drug commonly used on cats, dogs, and sometimes horses. Most likely, the barbiturate came from equines that were put down, but even the faintest possibility that “dogs might be fed dogs” is highly alarming, adds Bethencourt.
Moreover, the sheer volume of meat required to feed America’s dogs and cats has profound environmental downsides, says Bethencourt. Much of the meat for pet food is sourced from industrial operations—huge poultry and hog complexes, sprawling cattle feedlots—all of which pollute water, air, and land, and require tremendous inputs of grain that in turn represent massive carbon, pesticide, and fertilizer footprints.
“American pets—not people, just pets—rank fifth in terms of global meat consumption,” Bethencourt says, “and pet food accounts for between 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of the meat industry. The system we’ve developed for feeding our pets isn’t healthy or sustainable, and we want to change that.”
Bethencourt has long been a force in Bay Area bioengineering circles. He was a founder of Berkeley Biolabs, a DIY biohacking space, and co-founded IndieBio, a seminal biotechnology accelerator. At IndieBio, he, along with co-founder and chief science officer Ron Shigeta, helped scores of biotech companies secure funding for everything from mushroom “leather” and in vitro meat to universal antivenoms, virus-based sensors to detect airborne chemicals, and biochips that combine human neurons with electronic components. But for Bethencourt, something was missing.
“We wanted to do what we were helping other people do,” Bethencourt says. “We wanted to experience that ride.”
Alt pet food seemed like a logical choice, says Bethencourt, given the swelling numbers of dog and cat devotees and simultaneous concerns about food health and security. But they needed a feedstock: if not industrial meat, what? Certainly, there are plant-based pet foods out there, but their constituent nutrients are inadequate. Carnivores need a diversity of amino acids—the building blocks of protein—to thrive. Grains and soybeans only have a few of these essential amino acids.
“They’re lumpy,” says Shigeta, CSO of Wild Earth. “You want really smooth protein profiles, adjusted to the specific needs for dogs and cats. So grain-based pet foods need a lot of supplements. We wanted a feedstock that already had most of the necessary amino acids so it would require only minimal adjustment.”
What about cultured meat—the kind that’s grown from livestock cell lines and is now finding a human market? It’s not scalable, says Bethencourt. At its present stage of development, test tube beef may be affordable for someone with a fair amount of disposable income who wants cruelty-free meatballs for their spaghetti, but it’s way too pricey for pet-food-for-the-masses.
“We didn’t reveal the fact that it wasn’t meat-based, that it was made from koji—just that it was pet food….Eighty percent of our subjects said they would buy it.”
But, as it happened, Shigeta had just what was needed, and it was growing right in his basement: Koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, as it’s technically known. Koji is a mold-like fungus that can be cultivated on various substrates, including rice, soybeans, and potatoes, and has been used in Asia for millennia to produce soy sauce, miso, alcoholic beverages, and vinegar. It’s replete with amino acids and has a rich umami aroma and taste.
“I’ve cultivated it for a long time for own home food projects,” Shigeta says. “We do it just because we love the taste—but it’s also highly nutritious. It’s eaten regularly by more than a billion people, and it’s considered a probiotic.”
It can also be produced quickly and cheaply in multi-ton lots in bioreactors using simple cane sugar as the growing medium.
“It produces these big cakes that kind of look like tuna casserole,” Shigeta says.
For now, Wild Earth is focusing on dogs “like a laser,” says Florian Radke, the company’s chief marketing officer. Cats may come later. The team has conducted extensive research on canine microbiomes to ensure against the allergic reactions that are sometimes associated with meat feedstocks. Tests have confirmed that koji-based pet food is highly digestible by dog gastrointestinal tracts, and surveys of pet owners also found broad acceptability of the products, Bethencourt says.
Will people eschew meat-based pet foods for the good of the planet, or even their pets? Radke insists they will.
The company is working off $4 million in initial funding from various sources, says Bethencourt, including entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
“He totally got it,” Bethencourt says of his pitch session with Thiel. “We didn’t really have to sell him on it.”
The company is preparing for the release of several products. First up: doggy snacks, scheduled for roll out at a Berkeley event on July 7 th . The snacks are small, brown lozenges that have a nutty, appealing aroma and seem at least as appetizing as most of the human-oriented snacks you’d find in a typical convenience store.
And then there’s the market: Sure, koji-based pet food is likely to appeal to a select niche—the type of hyper-aware, socially engaged dog owner you’d find in Berkeley, for example. But can it really feed the canine hoi polloi? Will people eschew meat-based pet foods for the good of the planet, or even their pets? Radke is certain they will, and the company plans to produce products by “the tens of tons” to meet the anticipated demand. Koji-based kibble and snacks, insists Radke, are the right products at the right time and could well claim a big chunk of the $8 billion pet food market.
“Education will be part of the process, but when you open people’s eyes to the basic health and environmental problems [of meat-based pet food], we’re finding they want a solution,” says Radke. “Dogs and cats crave protein, but that’s not the same as craving meat. We’re providing better protein—and it’s protein without the cow in the middle.”
