A former ad exec who began to question the ethics of industrialized meat production after doing some strategy work for Burger King, Bond Pet Foods founder and CEO Rich Kelleman is not your average tech bro.
“My background is in advertising, so of course I started a biotech pet food company,” jokes Kelleman, who is forging a distinct path in the alternative protein space by engineering yeast to produce meat proteins for pet food via fermentation.
“Working on the Burger King account was the first time I really started to think about food sourcing and it was kind of an awakening for me. I became a vegetarian and ultimately a vegan.”
Inspired by startups such as Memphis Meats (now UPSIDE Foods), Kelleman initially planned to make cultivated meat for pets using animal cells, but changed tack after determining that the numbers didn’t add up (although he stresses he is not making any judgments about the viability of the technology for human food markets today).
However, the unit economics of engineering yeast cells to produce meat proteins make a lot more sense, given that Bond Pet Foods is harvesting the whole biomass rather than engaging in costly downstream processing to extract and purify the animal proteins, notes Kelleman. “That was our first pivot.”
The second pivot came last year when the Boulder, Colorado-based firm moved away from consumer products to focus exclusively on B2B opportunities after attracting interest from major pet food companies interested in buying more sustainable sources of high-quality animal protein, without slaughtering animals.
AgFunder News (AFN) caught up with Kelleman (RK) to discuss Bond Pet’s origins story, Gen Z ‘pet parents,’ and ‘de-risking’ the alt protein space as stakeholders navigate the current trough of disillusionment.
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