Would you feed your pet bugs? What about lab-grown meat? How about a vegan diet? From insect protein to cultivated meats and beyond, we’re exploring the landscape of alternative protein sources poised to transform the way we feed our pets, and even ourselves. In this episode, the second installment of our Trends to Watch in 2025 mini-series, we address cultural barriers like the "ick factor" surrounding insect protein and delve into cutting-edge technologies like lab-grown meat and bacteria that eat methane to become fermented proteins.

Helpful Links

Insect-Based Pet Food: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in Product Development: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/insect-based-pet-food-navigating-challenges-opportunities-xqkgc/

Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) as an Alternative Pet Food Protein: https://bsmpartners.net/insights/black-soldier-fly-larvae-as-an-alternative-protein-source-in-pet-diets/

Learn more about Bond Pet Foods’ precision fermentation process: https://www.petfoodprocessing.net/articles/17131-food-is-science-and-science-is-food-at-bond-pet-foods

From Meat to Microbes: Eco-Conscious Evolution of Pet Food Proteins: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-meat-microbes-eco-conscious-evolution-pet-food-proteins-x0yyc/

Cultured Meat in Pet Food: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cultured-meat-pet-food-bsm-partners-v7wrc/

Plant-Based Proteins for Pets: https://bsmpartners.net/insights/plant-based-proteins-for-pets/

Could invasive marine species pose another alternative protein opportunity for pets? https://bsmpartners.net/insights/riding-the-wave-how-alternative-marine-proteins-are-revolutionizing-pet-food/

Riding the Wave: How Alternative Marine Proteins Are Revolutionizing Pet Food: https://bsmpartners.net/insights/riding-the-wave-how-alternative-marine-proteins-are-revolutionizing-pet-food/

Show Notes

00:00 – Welcome Back!

02:24 – Will Insect Protein Fly or Fail in the US Market?

06:23 – Getting Educated on Cultured Proteins

08:02 – What Are Cultivated Meats?

11:35 – What Is Precision Fermentation?

13:41 – Methane-Eating Bacteria and Custom Capabilities

16:53 – What About Plant-Based Proteins and Invasive Species?

17:48 – The Big Picture of Sustainability

18:57 – Final Thoughts

Welcome back to Barking Mad's Top Trends to Watch in 2025, in

which we're sharing expert insights and opinions about the most influential

trends happening today in the pet nutrition space, and how pet parents

can stay informed and engaged as these trends evolve this year and beyond.

In today's episode, we're tackling the question of alternative proteins.

And boy, are there a lot of questions.

As the world's population grows and our food supply chain remains finite,

the need to identify alternative sources of key ingredients like protein

has become increasingly apparent, both for people and for our pets.

Insect protein offers a potential solution here, but Is it

destined to fly or fail in the U.

S.

markets?

Cultured proteins like cultivated and fermented meats are another option, but

while great strides are being made in these areas as we speak, there is still

work to be done in terms of scalability, pricing, and regulatory approval.

Plant based proteins offer yet another path forward, but following the DCM

debacle, many pet parents have a mistrust, whether misplaced or not, toward plant

protein forward diets for their pets.

But what about invasive species?

These pose a severe problem for waterways in the United States

and for biodiversity globally.

What about incorporating proteins from those streams into pet food?

These are just some of the questions looming over

alternative proteins for pets.

Over the course of today's episode, we'll go through each of these categories,

focusing in particular on barriers for the adoption of insect protein in

the American market, As well as the basis of cultured proteins and how a

handful of companies are pioneering this technology for use in pet nutrition.

Welcome to Barking Mad, a podcast by BSM Partners.

I'm your host, Jordan Tyler.

If you tuned into yesterday's episode on sustainable ingredient sourcing,

you may notice alternative proteins fit quite nicely within that trend.

As the quest for alternative proteins really stems from a need for more

sustainable pet food ingredients.

Along this vein, there are several approaches.

But let's talk first about insects as a viable protein source for pets.

When I sat down with Alison Rieser, Director of Sustainability and

Innovation with the Pet Sustainability Coalition, She was practically

buzzing with excitement to talk about this emerging alternative protein.

Partially because I have a cat and, like, very anecdotally,

like, she loves to eat insects that she finds, so, like, let's make

this a formal part of her diet.

There are a lot of companies out there innovating insect protein.

With sustainability in mind, so they're collecting some really good life cycle

assessment data about it and sharing it.

So that is a space I think is going to be really important for

PET.

However, while insect protein may pose a great opportunity for

sustainability and nutrition, the newness of the ingredient causes Dr.

Renee Streeter, Board Certified Veterinary Nutritionist,

to proceed a little cautiously.

As a nutritionist, when something new like that comes

out, you're like, well, I mean, sure, it looks okay, but what

about all the things we don't know?

What's going to happen when you feed it for 15 years?

I don't know.

But I will say, as time has gone on, these, uh, suppliers have done

a pretty good job of researching.

And there's, Last time I looked, quite a few insect protein studies in dogs

and even in cats, and so my cautiousness is being diminished over time.

The longer we use these things, the more studies we have.

Not that I still don't have questions, I do, but from a

nutritional standpoint, I become more excited and from a sustainability

standpoint, I become more excited.

And so now.

It's just a matter of can we win over the hearts of the general

public who, again, are maybe not as accustomed to eating bugs.

What Dr.

Streeter is describing here is the ick factor, or American consumers

cultural hesitance to feeding bug derived protein to their beloved pets.

The ick factor is certainly another barrier standing in the way of insect

protein taking flight in the U.

S.

market.

In fact, when we asked BSM Aperture, a powerful predictive tool helping

bridge the gap between nascent trends and their real potential in

the market, about whether insect protein would fly or fail in the U.

S.

market, it had some reservations about whether or not this

trend would actually succeed.

In part, due to bugs being gross in the eyes of American pet parents.

However, according to Dr.

Blaire Aldridge, Vice President of Nutrition Services at BSM Partners,

this doesn't mean we shouldn't still move forward with research.

You hear bug and you're all like, bleh, initially.

But then you start looking at the research coming in over time,

and that will itself fly or fail.

Like it will tell us.

Good or bad.

And I will say this, there might be a time where it is necessary to pivot

because maybe disease comes through and knocks out the United States's poultry

population or whatever it might, the soy, it doesn't matter, but we should already

have Plans in place for alternative protein sources and have to research

there to know if it's okay or not.

Whether we love it or hate it, we should be studying it.

So time will tell whether insect protein will truly fly

or fail in the pet nutrition space.

And while we're approaching this trend with a fair amount of skepticism, it's

still going to be one to watch in 2025.

Let's move now to an exciting trend making waves in the alternative protein space.

Cultured proteins, which are created through two types of technology.

There's cultivation and then there's precision fermentation.

Before we get too in the weeds though, let's go inside the mind of Dr.

Bradley Quest, Principal of Veterinary Services at BSM Partners, to understand

why exactly these high tech ingredients could change the game for pet nutrition.

These are primary protein ingredients to use in pet

food that really are products of using, in one case, bacteria, in other

cases, yeasts, in some cases, using actual animal cell cultures to then

propagate and grow, if you will, natural proteins from these organic sources.

Now, the methodologies can be different, and in a lot of cases they are.

But the really cool thing about it is it meets a lot of what we're

looking for in the pet food industry.

We're looking for sustainable, and I know that word is used a lot, but most

of these really are sustainable in that we're not utilizing a lot of resources, be

it natural resources, organic resources.

Um, energy resources, in a lot of cases that we use for other protein sources,

being animal or plant sources, that takes a lot of agricultural input.

Not that those are definitely going away because they're not.

They're always going to be front and center, but what this does is it helps

take some of the pressure, I think, off of that and makes for really good

alternative sources for pet food use.

So, let's get into this topic, starting with cultivated meats.

Joshua Ehret, founder and chief executive officer of Friends and Family Pet Food,

has been playing in this space for several years, and he's on a mission to change pet

nutrition for the better, using technology that could revolutionize our food system.

Cultivation, also referred to as lab grown meat.

Historically, it was used to study cancer, how a

cancer cell might grow or other cells in the human body might grow.

It was only in the 2010s, or the aughts, I guess they call them, that

they looked at this and it was like, if you can grow mammalian cells.

without a sentient body, then could you do this for the food system?

So that's for the genesis of it.

And then in, I believe it was 2009, they grew the first hamburger.

And then 2013, 14, I think the first patents were issued to

Memphis Meats, who are now upside.

foods in the space.

So from there, it became this idea that we could almost recreate the

entire food system on a cellular level, call it cellular agriculture.

And, you know, when you talk about cellular agriculture,

you're recreating meat.

So it's the entire tissue of the animal.

So that's fat.

muscle, connective tissue, the whole thing, which includes

proteins, everything that comes in meat, fatty acids, et cetera.

You're cultivating everything in the cell and creating the tissue.

And there are types of tissue you can create, just fat or just muscle, but

generally when you put it together, You have something akin to meat that most

people eat today, including our pets.

And as I always say, there's so much more to meat than protein.

And if you look at a cat biology and physiology and how it eats and digests.

That's perfect evidence of why cats need more than just protein.

Okay, so a quick lesson on cultivated protein.

Cultivated meat involves extracting muscle cells from a live animal, taken

humanely, and then pairing those muscle cells with a quote unquote culture medium.

In other words, a nutrient rich substance designed to help

those cells grow big and strong.

Now, in this controlled environment, the cells multiply and begin forming

muscle tissue that is cellularly identical to conventional meat.

This, according to Josh, presents a world of opportunity, particularly for our pets.

Cultivated meat, to me, is The brass ring, the Holy grail, whatever

you want to say, uh, pet nutrition, because you can make truly unparalleled

nutrition out of cultivated meat.

You can tune the amino acid profile.

You can tune other nutrients in there as well.

And my big vision for cultivated meat.

Is to create, uh, food for, uh, you know, a cat or dog that contains

everything that the cat or dog needs.

So, like, all the palatants, all the, uh, premix vitamins and minerals.

can be added and cultivated instead of just thrown in in a sort of powder format

at the end of the manufacturing process.

Even just standardizing what comes in meat that goes into pet

food would be a huge advantage.

So all these things put together make me really obsessed about

cultivated meat for pets.

Now, cultivated meat is one approach to cultured protein

or cellular agriculture, whereas another is precision fermentation.

This is a technology that's been used for decades to produce enzymes

for cheese and yogurt production, in pharmaceutical manufacturing, and a

whole host of other commercial uses.

Bond Pet Foods has been developing its Precision Fermentation technology

for several years, specifically to provide animal free protein

ingredients to key partners across the pet food and animal feed industries,

including Hills Pet Nutrition, And agribusiness giant Wilbur Ellis.

We sat down with Rich Killiman, founder and chief executive officer of Bond

Pet Foods, to learn a little bit more about what this technology offers.

So we are an older Colorado based company that's working

with fermentation to make meat protein, like chicken, turkey, and fish, without

the animal, for pet food applications.

Our proteins are complete, allowing brands to fully replace their meat meals

by products one to one in their recipes.

It's lean, it's scalable, so the math makes sense from a unit economics

standpoint to include it at high inclusion in their formulations.

And I think, just as important, it's wholly more efficient.

Sustainable and humane compared with meat and animal ingredients that are

available in the pet food supply chain today, we're not creating a new way to

make ingredients that could have value in the pet or human food supply chain.

We're working with.

A technology that's been around for more than half a century to make everything

from enzymes for cheese manufacture, to good bacteria for probiotic

supplements, to vanilla and a host of other ingredients that we're consuming

on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

It's just a creative way to employ that same kind of food process to

create a different kind of protein and ingredient that could have

value for a different audience.

While operations like the one at Bond Pet Foods use sugar

fed yeast to develop its fermented proteins, there are other ways to feed

a microorganism and encourage it to to grow up into a full fledged protein.

For example, Calista, a cellular agriculture company based in Silicon

Valley, is using methane to fuel its precision fermentation process.

Here's a quick overview from Herman Sloot, vice president of

commercial development at Calista.

So the very specific characteristic of these bacteria is

that they use methane or methanol as a substrate instead of sugar.

These bacteria are able to metabolize natural gas and use that natural gas as

the energy source for the fermentation.

And that is completely different than bacteria that grow on sugar.

So one of the first things is If you want to do fermentation, you need to have a

very good control of your biomass because that determines how the bacteria will grow

and how these bacteria can produce then a biomass with a specific protein content.

If you don't control your feedstock, you cannot control your fermentation.

So you have to make sure that you have a steady supply.

In terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality of what you get.

So we believe that natural gases do both of that.

It's crazy to think that bacteria can eat methane and

turn it into something us and our pets can benefit from nutritionally.

I was pretty blown away by that, and I think it sort of exemplifies

how cool this trend is and the opportunities it offers for the future.

Another cool aspect of the cultured protein movement, both cultivated

and fermented, is the ability to fine tune your inputs to get

specific outputs, as noted by Dr.

Renee Strader.

Some of these cultured meats can be modified so that they're

producing certain amino acids, more or less, or even certain types of proteins

that are similar to our animal proteins.

And so it becomes really customizable, which I think, is

probably the wave of the future.

We can utilize them maybe a little bit more efficiently

to meet our amino acid needs.

And also if animals have certain restrictions, we could probably

pull back on certain amino acids that may cause issues or make

it more likely an issue occurs.

So while the idea of growing proteins in a laboratory has

a sort of Frankenstein feel to it.

It's actually a super exciting innovation for the global food supply.

And like Rich Kellerman noted, we've actually been using this technology

for a really long time already.

We're just using it now in a different way.

I'm excited to keep up with Josh, Rich, Herman, and others in this

space to see how it evolves.

this year and in the future.

Now, before we start winding down today, I want to make two quick mentions.

As plant based proteins and invasive species are also poised to join the

alternative protein conversation for pets.

However, while the opportunity lies in wait, what we really need is research

to ensure that pets can pick up Truly thrive on a plant only diet, and that

the use of invasive species tracks with supporting our pet's nutritional needs.

My amazing colleagues have authored quite a few articles on the merits of

plant-based nutrition and the use of invasive species, which we will link

to the show notes for this episode if you'd like to learn more, but.

For now, it's safe to say the alternative protein space is growing and evolving, and

we'll be keeping a close eye on each of these categories to keep you up to speed

on where we sit and where we're headed.

As we close out today's episode, let's hear from Emily Messnier, Vice

President of European Operations at BSM Partners, a palatability expert by

trade and sustainability guru by choice.

When I asked Emily what she thought about alternative proteins for pets, she said

she sees more than one avenue as key to addressing the need for more sustainable

pet food ingredients and supply chains.

This includes upcycling, which we discussed in yesterday's episode,

as well as emerging options like insect protein, cultured meats, and

other alternatives.

The need for alternative proteins is undeniable, and that translates

with significant investments pouring into everything from insect

farms, you know, cultured meat facilities, upcycled ingredients.

yeast based, algae based, you know, non meat based type of protein, even

climate resistant and resilient crops.

So this excitement stems from the potential of these proteins to

offer a more sustainable and more ethical alternative to traditional

intensive animal agriculture.

So there you have it, our deep dive into the fascinating

world of alternative proteins.

From insects buzzing with potential Pun intended.

To the sci fi turned reality of cultivated meats and precision fermentation, it's

clear that the future of pet nutrition is evolving right before our eyes.

Whether you're excited about sustainability benefits of an insect

protein, intrigued by the customization possibilities that cultured meat offers,

or curious about the potential of methane eating bacteria, Alternative proteins are

piquing our interest, and advancements in the stays will certainly be worth watching

in 2025 and in the years to follow.

But we're not done yet.

Tomorrow, we'll release yet another episode exploring our third trend

to watch in 2025, and perhaps my personal favorite, biotic ingredients.

Be sure to tune in for a fascinating discussion about how these powerful

microorganisms could transform pet health from the inside out.

Until then, thank you for tuning in to Barking Mad, a podcast by BSM Partners.

If you'd like to learn more about us, please visit our

website@www.bsmpartners.net.

Don't forget to subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and if you enjoy

today's episode, share it with a fellow pet lover and leave us a review.

Lastly, be sure to stay tuned for more insights this week

from our Trends 2025 miniseries.

As well as future episodes on pet care innovation, sustainability, and other hard

hitting topics you won't want to miss.

We'd like to thank our dedicated team in support of this episode.

Edmiette Thomas, Neely Bowden, Kate Wright, and Dr.

Katie Miller.

A special thanks to Leanne Haggerty and Michael Johnson.

See you next time!