Peter Thiel backed vegan pet food startup selling fungus dog treats

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• A vegan pet food startup called
  Wild Earth recently scored $450,000 from tech mogul Peter
  Thiel along with backing from Mars Veterinary, the world’s
  biggest pet food maker.
• Its first products —
  vegan dog treats made with
  koji, a type of fungus similar to mushrooms — went on sale
  Monday.
• Wild Earth’s CEO told Business Insider he plans to
  eventually get into the
  lab-grown meat business.
• That would involve taking stem cells from mice and
  
  brewing them up in bioreactors to make pet chow.

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Entrepreneur and scientist Ryan Bethencourt won’t feed his foster
dogs ingredients that he wouldn’t eat himself. So the long-time
vegan, who previously founded the
Silicon Valley biotech startup hub IndieBio, created a
startup called Wild Earth that’s making animal-free pet food
using koji.

The same organism that gives miso soup and sake their pungent
kick, koji is the main ingredient in Wild Earth’s first products:
vegan dog treats that went on sale Monday.

Wild Earth — which has been
backed by tech mogul Peter Thiel and global pet food
manufacturer
Mars Veterinary — is not limiting itself to koji. Bethencourt
told Business Insider he aims to eventually produce dog food made
with meat from mouse cells. That would involve taking stem cells
from mice and
brewing them up in bioreactors to make pet chow.

“People who don’t have cats think this is crazy, but cat parents
think it’s super cool,” Bethencourt
told Business Insider in August.

The race to lab-grown sausages, burgers … and dog food?

A
handful of startups around the world are racing to make
lab-grown meat a reality for humans in order to protect the
planet. To do it, they are taking stem cells from pigs, cows, and
chickens (without killing them), multiplying the cells in labs,
and stuffing them into prototype recipes for everything from
sausages to burgers and meatballs.

Business Insider
got its first taste of lab-grown sausage in September.
(Here’s
what it was like.)

Bethencourt claims Wild Earth has plans to do the same thing for
pets. Instead of pork, beef, or chicken, the food would be
mouse-based.

Other startups in the lab-grown meat space aren’t thrilled about
Bethencourt’s stated aims. Marketing cultured meat as dog food
could destroy its appeal for human consumers, executives from two
leading startups in the food tech space told Business Insider in
August.

“Would this jeopardize clean meat or make people associate it
with lower quality food? Possibly,” Didier Toubia, the co-founder
and CEO of an
Israeli clean meat startup called Aleph Farms, told Business
Insider.

“People won’t want to eat food that’s for pets,” Toubia said.

Bethencourt disagrees, noting that he thinks clean meat for
humans will arrive first. He believes that part of the transition
to eating more sustainable food includes making sure pets are
eating more sustainably too. That includes lab-grown meat.

“In the same way there’s plant-based protein for humans and
cultured meat for humans we want to make sure that’s also the
case for our pets,” Bethencourt said. “We will do koji; that’s
one of our primary protein sources, but we want to have other
proteins available for our customers too.”