Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. What a pleasure to talk in this episode with my dear friend Shannon Falconer, a fellow Canadian living in Vienna. Shannon is the founder and CEO of BioCraft Pet Nutrition, which I think is the world's most important pet food company. They're making real meat for pet food while not harming a single animal. I'm your host, Ryan Grant Little. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Shannon, welcome to the podcast.

Shannon Falconer: 1:12

Thank you, Ryan, I'm very happy to be here.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:15

So talk about one of my favorite alt proteins companies, BioCraft Pet Nutrition.

Shannon Falconer: 1:21

Yeah, okay, well, I guess the company you know the company was founded in 2016, but I think really, I probably in many ways unofficially founded the company over 40 years ago when I was my mom. Actually, at the time that I was around, the time I was born, my mom had adopted a taken in a strafe pregnant cat and her name is Missy. We named her Missy and anyhow. So I was an infant at the time and I guess you know my mom would say everybody told me, don't let the cat sleep in the crib with the baby, she'll suffocate her. But my mom did anyway, because the cat, for whatever reason, me and the catch is gravitated towards one another and I think for like 18 years, you know, every night that I was sleeping at home, that cat slept in bed with me until she passed away from kidney failure and still to this day I have dreams about her every, probably once every two years. And that was the closest relationship at sort of the youngest age, my closest relationship with any being. And then I had two other cats as well and three dogs, and so I think the connection that I built with animals at a young age, it just sort of formed a real foundation for me that these are, these are my, my species, like you know, connecting feeling relating less to human species but cats and dogs. And then and then I stopped eating meat in my early teens, also for animal welfare reasons, you know, sort of connecting the dots between the fact that, okay, my cats and dogs are not humans and cows and pigs are not humans, and so on and so forth, and I don't want to eat my cats and dogs, I don't want to eat cows and pigs, and then starting to volunteer at animal rescue in my early, I guess, late teens or early 20s, whatever, and I've been doing that for pretty much my entire adult life. But I'm a scientist by training. So in addition to my passion for, you know, just loving animals, I also have a deep love for science and curiosity.

Shannon Falconer: 3:14

So I did my master's in U of T in Canada, which is where I'm from Toronto area, and then my PhD at McMaster University, also in Canada, and then in chemical biology, and then moved to California and was working on my postdoc at Stanford University and it was really there that I think I was able to develop the courage, because you know, there's like nine out of 10 people on Stanford campus, have a, have a startup, and it really is this incredible place in the world where anything and everything is possible. And I had long sort of known that if I could somehow apply my science in a way that was meaningful more meaningful than just sort of you know academic pursuit that I would love to. But I didn't ever really see it as being an option until I was there, and that's when I really decided that yeah, forget it, I'm. I'm leaving my postdoc specifically to apply my scientific training to taking animals out of the supply chain.

Shannon Falconer: 4:08

And at first I thought I would focus on the human food industry because, of course, humans are the main consumers of animal based products. But then, as I started to think about it more but you know, I haven't eaten meat for how many decades? And I'm alive and well, and but I have I'm really hamstrung by having to feed my cats in particular and dogs, but cats very specifically at these meat ingredients, meat based products that and serve an industry that I otherwise wouldn't support. And so that was sort of the first like hmm, maybe there's something to this.

Ryan Grant Little: 4:40

Well, I can certainly understand your connection with your cat. I think of my 18 year old cat, Oliver, who I've had since he was a kitten, you know when I rescued him from the Toronto Humane Society, and the bond you form with them over these years is really incredible. And this is the topic I think about a lot because, like you, I'm plant based. But I have this you know, little kitten or little old man cat and a giant dog, you know, 130 pound Great Dain, and both of them eat meat.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:08

So it's kind of like I mean, what you know? What am I doing here? From environmental and animal cruelty perspective? You know, the best thing and this is probably the biggest paradox is that the people who love animals the most and don't eat them because of for this reason, are also the ones you want to have them in their lives. So I get that, and I think there are probably a lot of people in this boat. Why is it not possible to just make dogs and cats vegan too?

Shannon Falconer: 5:34

Yeah, great question. So I mean, just as you and I are very much omnivores, humans are omnivores, and so it's no problem for us to say, okay, we don't want to support this industry, so we're going to switch to a plant-based diet for cats and dogs. So it's a little bit different between the two. So, metabolically speaking, dogs are omnivores. So actually, metabolically, dogs are closer to you and me than they are to cats, and so again, metabolically speaking, dogs absolutely can be vegetarian or vegan. They can derive all of the nutrients they need from plant-based sources. Those plant-based sources just have to be varied.

Shannon Falconer: 6:12

One of the benefits of meat is that all of those nutrients are in one place. But for dogs, if they're eating an appropriately balanced diet and getting all their nutrients from a combination of different plant-based ingredients, then that's fine. However, taxonomically they're referred to as carnivores. So people still very much cling to this idea that dogs are like wolves, they're the ancestors and therefore dogs need meat. So then you run into a real marketing challenge around trying to just general consumer acceptance. But for cats this situation is a little bit more complicated, because cats are what are referred to as obligative carnivores. So metabolically, there are a number of nutrients that they really can In the wild.

Shannon Falconer: 6:54

Their only source of complete nutrition is meat, and so for there are some vegan cat foods that are on the market, very, very niche, but there are a few challenges with them. The first is that those key nutrients some of them, for example, taurine being one of them that people often cite, like you know, if cats, if you try to make a cat a vegetarian or vegan, the cat will go blind, and that's because taurine as a nutrient is only naturally produced by animal cells. So in order to make a nutritionally complete vegan or vegetarian food, that taurine has to be added back to cat food in a synthetic form, and so actually and that's the case for numerous, many nutrients they have to be provided. It's a synthetic source, but it's possible. So theoretically it's possible, but then you run into the actual acceptance of the food from the cat.

Shannon Falconer: 7:43

So one of the main drivers of palatability for cats is animal fat, just the taste. And you know where we can get complete amino acid profiles. You know again, you can use plants to formulate different types of plants and you can combine them to make sure you have an amino acid profile that is reflects a protein, a complete protein, such as an animal. Plants just don't make animal fat, so for a cat to actually accept the cat food, the vegan cat food, there's a lot of challenges around that, because cats just don't like the taste, and if a cat doesn't like something, a cat's not going to eat it, and then this is a big problem. So vegan cat food is just, generally speaking, a nightmare, and this is why we need to be thinking about how do we create an environmentally sustainable and humane source of meat for pet foods.

Shannon Falconer: 8:33

There are a lot of companies already on the market that do advertise themselves as being companies that are humane and sustainable, even though they're animal based products, and this is again, it's a little bit frustrating, because this is really. These are claims that anybody can make. You know, we are sustainable, we are humane, but ultimately, at the end of the day, an animal is still raised and slaughtered for that pet food, and so the animal can be treated better than, maybe, you know, another animal. So there's some standards in place that way, but again, the animal is still slaughtered for the food, and they're still, and unfortunately, the better an animal is treated, the worse the environmental footprint is right, because that animal now has more space to graze. And so those are. It is absolutely impossible for these companies who are producing, sourcing meat from animals to say, oh, it's both humane and sustainable. You can't get both and you can't even realistically. You cannot even get either individually, as long as an animal is in the equation. So what are we left with? We're left with cultured meat.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:35

People are often surprised to hear that the environmentally most unfriendly meat is grass fed beef. That, for example those reasons, but so yeah, so enter cultured meat, which is what you do. Can you talk a little bit? So this is real meat in this pet food but doesn't come from an animal. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? What kind of meat is it? How is it made? What does it look like?

Shannon Falconer: 9:59

Yeah. So the meat it doesn't come from a whole animal, it comes from animal cells, and so we started. So I'll just step back and say, in terms of the species, we actually started with mouse, mouse being the ancestral diet of the cat. So in the wild, cats eat mice, they small birds and insects, Although chicken, beef, seafood. These are the main ingredients in pet food. They're also the main allergens for our cats and dogs. Nevertheless, that's the supply chain for the human food industry. So this is why these protein sources are fed to our animals. So in making cultured meat, we really saw this as an opportunity to grow the protein source that's most evolutionarily appropriate for our cats, and so hence we started with mouse.

Shannon Falconer: 10:40

So what we did with mouse and what we, what we can do with any animals, basically you take a small collection of cells from an animal in a one time scenario and then you don't ever go back to that animal again, and so from there we are working with something that are a type of cell called pluripotent stem cells.

Shannon Falconer: 10:57

And pluripotent stem cells are naturally the only cells in a body that continue to grow indefinitely until there's some kind of stimulus, whether or not it's in a body or outside of the body that says to the cell okay, now it's time for you to differentiate and that's the term used to describe, to tell these cells to either to form muscle tissue, heart tissue, liver tissue, organ tissue of some kind.

Shannon Falconer: 11:22

And so now we have our stock, you know, our master stock of our pluripotent stem cells that we never run out of. And basically what we do is we take those cells and we put them in a vessel that's warm and allows for gas exchange you know, very, very similar to a body which is a vessel that's warm and allows for gas exchange and we feed it nutrients, and we feed it the same nutrients that our bodies are fed when we are eating. Well, when we're eating even, for example, if we think of a cow which is fed a plant based diet we're feeding those cells the same plant based nutrients or ingredients that the cow is fed. So from there, we continue to grow the cells in this bioreactor and in the end, we harvest basically everything from that bioreactor that contains the cells and importantly, especially importantly for our cats and dogs the nutrients, those animal based nutrients that those cells make, because that is what is really critical to make cultured meat for pet food. We need to really really be focused on this.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:24

Somehow it sounds like a great slogan to be mouse, the ancestral diet of the cat.

Shannon Falconer: 12:30

But yeah, it is.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:32

Yeah, it's like a new beef it's what's for dinner instead of that. But you talked about the nutrients in cultured food. I think that's an important point as well, because I know a little bit about the rendering business, having been in biogas and this type of thing. It's a huge, huge business, and the process of rendering was just like taking the dead stock or the meat that can't be used for humans and converting it into something that's generally used for pet food. They're rendering at such high temperatures that a lot of the nutritional content in the proteins in the meat and a lot of the vitamins basically get burned off, and so someone told me once that in the pet food industry most of the nutrients anyway that you would normally get from meat are being replenished through the plant based side of things in general. So it's kind of like this weird equation that a lot of the stuff you'd expect to get from the meat is not actually coming through from the meat.

Shannon Falconer: 13:28

Yeah, it's your totally spot on and it's bizarre to think about it, but that's because the reason why people are so focused on meat for their pet food is because, nutritionally speaking, this is what they believe. You know their pets need to be fed but, as you say, during that rendering process, those high pressures and temperatures, they destroy a lot of the nutritional value, so especially the water soluble nutrients, such as taurine, for example, and this is why, actually, this is why, for any pet parents listening, if they take a look at their pet's food, if they have a can of kibble or, sorry, a can of wet food or a bag of kibble and there's a fairly long ingredient list, and after they see sort of the first core ingredients, which might be chicken or chicken meal, maybe rice, some fruit and vegetables, they'll see a long list of the vitamins and minerals that have had to be added back to the food. And that's something that the industry has a name for. It is called a pre-mix, and this pre-mix is basically a blend of all of those essential nutrients that cats and dogs need, that are lost during the manufacturing process and then need to be added back.

Shannon Falconer: 14:33

So one of the great things about making cultured meat is that we don't need to go through a rendering process after the fact, because our meat does not need to be sterilized, because our meat is not grown surrounded by basically, fecal bacteria, right? And so what happens? Of course, at the slaughterhouses, these animals, which are raised in surrounded by manure and then contaminating bacteria such as listeria, salmonella E coli, is rife, and so hence rendering and decontamination For us. We grow the meat in a vessel that contains no manure or any of the bacteria that would come from manure, and so it's a very, very clean and controlled process. So our meat does not need to be subjected to any of the processing downstream processing and hence the nutrients are intact, and this is a really, really nice advantage, just a really nice sort of nice, very, very nice, nice to have when it comes to cultured meat for pet food.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:28

So talk about these vessels a little bit and the production process. What's this going to look like? I think you said that in 2025, you're going to be on the market through commercially available pet foods. What are you growing this in? Are these massive stainless steel tubs, or what does it look like?

Shannon Falconer: 16:45

Yeah, I mean basically. So our scale up process. It's very, very similar to what the pharmaceutical industry or what the beer industry or what the probiotic industry is already doing, and that is, growing cells in vessels that are fed nutrients to make those more and more of those cells grow and then scaling it up. So this is not a novel process and from this sense, it's actually quite a very, very finely tuned process that these various industries have been performing, using for decades now, and so, just as exactly as you say, we basically continue to move up in these bioreactor sizes, which are these stainless steel tanks, and moving from sort of 2 liters to 20 liters, to 200 liters, to 2,000 liters, to 20,000 liters, and producing from there.

Shannon Falconer: 17:34

And it is. It's a very I think I would for folks who make the argument ah, but this is not natural, this is not. Yeah, this is a unnatural manufactured type of meat, and I would encourage people to think about it in a couple of ways, one being, if we sort of stand back and look at what exactly is natural, then we think about the food that we eat, and the vast majority of food that any person eats is heavily manufactured, right, unless you're literally picking the apple from a tree and eating it. As soon as you take a loaf of bread, as soon as you open a container of yogurt, these otherwise very healthy foods. They're still heavily manufactured and, similarly to the pet food that is currently being served the kibbles and wet food patés today manufactured.

Shannon Falconer: 18:21

So basically, we are working through a process that you know, the same way the other conventional food producers. We are following a similar path, which is that we are producing food commercially in facilities that have you know checks and balances with regards to safety but, as it happens again, because we don't actually go through the whole slaughter process of an animal, our food is actually inherently naturally more safe. It has safer characteristics to it. But yeah, I think the whole argument of natural is one that maybe it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction that people make without thinking much about what exactly that means. And I think if people just took a little, just a few minutes it's always required and just reflected on that it might make a little bit more sense.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:09

I often think about how the beef. You know, if you look at beef or pork or something like that, it's one ingredient right on a label. But if you actually looked what's in that and what you know what was in that animal, it's hundreds and hundreds of ingredients. And I mean the whole process of getting a steak to your table is a highly, highly processed number of steps and I think we all have this idea, I think this kind of legacy idea of animal agriculture as being something kind of natural which it's really not, or at least not anymore. But so if I'm imagining, taking the example of a steak, if getting meat from kind of the animal structure down to pet food, which you know is usually this like kibble or kind of a slurry, if you're starting from cells, you're building up to that so you actually have this advantage of being able to create and customize, kind of like you're dropping some steps out because you're creating a slurry instead of steaks.

Shannon Falconer: 20:09

Yeah, precisely so. A couple of things where the manufacturers of cultured meat for human food consumption, following that proliferation stage of actually growing those cells in a bioreactor they're still in this 3D liquid form, right, and then they have to take those cells, and now they have to in the downstream manufacturing piece they have to provide this three-dimensionality to.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:36

Cultured meat for humans right.

Shannon Falconer: 20:37

Exactly so, in contrast, so, to cultured food for humans, that needs to.

Shannon Falconer: 20:42

Then you take the meat that comes out, which is just the cell in the liquid, and then structure it into something that looks like a steak or chicken breast.

Shannon Falconer: 20:50

So it requires a lot of, of course, scaffolding and structure and texture that needs to be added, and visually it just needs to look good to humans.

Shannon Falconer: 21:00

Right For us, though, we are just taking the slurry, because, when it comes to pet food, what the industry often does is it might take, you know, the heart or the liver, which it has some structure to it, you know, not something that a human wants to eat directly off their plate typically, but nevertheless it has some structure, and then that ingredient is often like homogenized, or one ways that it can be used is it's homogenized and it's actually turned into something called slurry, so it's sort of liquefied, because that liquefied version of the meat is easier to use in terms of processing, to make a kibble or a wet food pate.

Shannon Falconer: 21:38

So, for our purposes as a cultured meat pet food manufacturer sorry, ingredient manufacturer we already have the liquefied version. It's already in a liquid, there's no need to liquefy it after the fact, and so, as you say, it does eliminate not one but many steps and we can provide this ingredient to manufacturers directly and they there's no more sort of fuss, they don't have to. Actually they don't have to do anything with it. They just sort of basically use this ingredient as it is, without any additional downstream manufacturing steps.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:10

So you talked about being an ingredient. So that means that people aren't going to go to Walmart and buy BioC raft off the shelf. You're going to be an ingredient in pet food brands that are already out there.

Shannon Falconer: 22:20

That's exactly it. So the way that we've been thinking about this is, especially as a company, that's very mission based. Our objective is to get our product in the hands of as many people as possible in order to ideally compete with traditional sources of meat. And the reality is that if you're a brand, a B2C brand, and you're a new brand, especially in the pet food category, that's a real heavy lift in terms of forming your consumer base and really being able to sell the quantity of meat or product that you would want to be able to sell, versus the existing pet food companies that already are very, very well established in terms of they have the know how and the prowess to be able to make the food and they importantly, they have the customer base. And so ideally for us as a company that's focused on volumes, we want to be able to provide pet food manufacturers who then already have those consumers waiting in the wings for this product and we, together with them, can sort of step in and fill the gap and just hit the ground running.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:25

And what do these big pet food companies think about you right now? Do they feel threatened or do they see this as an opportunity? Or where are they on cultured meat and BioCraft?

Shannon Falconer: 23:34

Well, the exchanges that we've been having have all been very, very positive and something that we haven't talked about today.

Shannon Falconer: 23:41

But in addition to, of course, companies the pet food manufacturers wanting to be able to provide customers with a sustainable and humane option, which a lot of customers want, there's another reason why pet food companies are interested in our product, and that's because the animal ingredient supply chain is the worst when it comes to all of the various ingredients that pet food manufacturers need to be able to secure to make a product.

Shannon Falconer: 24:05

It is the most volatile when we're talking about meat ingredients, animal fat and animal protein. So the industry manufacturers commonly face not only volatility in terms of price, but also volatility in terms of stock outs, complete stock outs, and so this is hugely problematic because, of course, it affects the bottom line and so the opportunity to potentially vertically integrate meat production and not have to worry about things like the nature of so, for example, bird flu that's affecting supply, or the weather, extreme weather events that are affecting supply, and so on and so forth the human food supply chain needs that are affecting supply. So pet food industries are very, very interested in this product from a supply chain stability perspective because this enables them. It's a potential opportunity to vertically integrate an ingredient that they otherwise wouldn't be able to vertically integrate, and they could have control over this supply and price.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:01

Okay, so it's sticking a lot of boxes. It's cleaner, it's better for the supply chain, but it must be a hell of a lot more expensive, isn't it?

Shannon Falconer: 25:08

Well, no, this is where a hell of a lot is a subjective term, so if I would say it's not a hell of a lot more right now, it is still a premiumly priced ingredient. So where we're at right now is we're at a price point that is very, very close to the premium price point of culture of slurries meat slurries that meat manufacturer sell. So there's a huge price range depending on the type of meat. So, for example, if you're looking at something like chicken and it's a very, very like it's factory firm chicken, this can be very, very cheap versus a more quote, unquote exotic protein which might be something like rabbit or kangaroo, something that people don't eat as much. Actually, a lot of people.

Shannon Falconer: 25:54

The pet food industry is very, very keen on these alternative protein sources because they have these inherent high quality properties. The challenges there's no stable supply chain. This is why you don't see more rabbit available, but because of this, the producers of the manufacturers can charge quite a premium, especially if it's an organic rabbit. Those prices can be. Yeah, they are much more, they're much higher than what you would find it sort of the very, very low end chicken slurry. So our price point is very, very close to what is currently available in the premium price point, and we will soon be making a public announcement regarding our current price point of our ingredient, which is very, very competitive.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:32

So currently at least, that kangaroo price parody right now.

Shannon Falconer: 26:38

Or close to it.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:40

I like that. And when can people expect to see BioC raft on the market? I think I read twenty twenty five.

Shannon Falconer: 26:47

We're definitely on track to be available as early as twenty twenty five and, yeah, we're speaking with regulators as well as potential manufacturing partners about making that happen ASAP.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:59

I know you're probably keen to hear from any pet food companies or companies that invest in pet food or alternative proteins. Where's the best place for people to reach you?

Shannon Falconer: 27:08

So they can find me on LinkedIn. They can also check out our website Bioc raft pet. com, and we have an email link there as well.

Ryan Grant Little: 27:17

Great, and I'll be sure to put this all on the show notes as well. Shannon Falconer, thank you so much for joining today. Thanks for listening to Another ClimateT ech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations climate tech pod. com. Find me, Ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.