Friends & Family Pet Food, Novel Farms co-developing cultivated meat for pets | PetfoodIndustry

The partnership hopes to launch a product line in 2025.

Friends & Family Pet Food Company (FnF) has announced a collaboration with Novel Farms, a biotech startup that develops cultivated animal meat ingredients, to produce cultivated meat for cats and dogs. According to reports, Friends & Family and Novel Farms are in the testing and prototyping stages right now to determine which meats they want to focus on with a 2025 launch for the product line.

Based in Berkeley, California, U.S., Novel Farms uses a novel microbial fermentation approach to develop a scaffolding platform that can significantly reduce production costs while providing an ideal surface to produce structured cultivated meat products.

Based in San Francisco, California, U.S., FnF focuses on developing and producing pet food using cultivated meat and fish aiming to provide a sustainable and ethical alternative to traditional animal protein in pet food, with a primary focus on reducing environmental impact by minimizing reliance on factory farming and overfishing. In July, the company partnered with Umami Bioworks to develop cultivated seafood products for pets.

FnF announced it will incorporate Novel Farms’ cultivated ingredients into its cat and dog formulas and has begun engaging with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) in hopes of launching the product first to pet owners in the San Francisco Bay Area.