UMAMI x Marina Cat: Pioneering Cultivated Pet Food
Today, we are delighted to announce the launch of our partnership with Marina Cat to power the development of a line of cat treats and foods with sustainably produced cultivated fish. This is our first commercial product partnership outside of premium seafood for people, and represents our first step towards building a broader portfolio of products supported by our platform technology.
Why is UMAMI talking about pet food?
we could feed 1 billion more people with fish we currently feed to animals
Pets consume a lot of meat and seafood. In the US, cats and dogs account for 30% of the environmental impact of meat consumption, according to a 2017 study by University of California Los Angeles.¹ If pets worldwide made up their own country, they would rank FIFTH globally in meat consumption.² We can’t solve global food sustainability without addressing pet food.
Pet food diets are also meat heavy and are responsible for significant levels of greenhouse gas emissions as a result. A study estimated that the ecological footprint — the “paw-print” — of the population of dogs and cats in China is equivalent to that of 70 to 245 million Chinese citizens, depending on the size of the animals and their diets.³
But pet food isn’t just beef and chicken. Pets consume millions of tons of fish that could otherwise feed humans. According to a 2008 study,⁴ 28.3 million tons of fish, or 37% of our total global catch, is used to feed animals yearly. 27% of this (about 10 million tons) feeds pets.
Although common perception is that pet and animal feed is usually made of offcuts and byproducts, this is simply not the case for fish. 90% of fish caught for animal feed is considered human grade.⁵ This means that we compete with our pets and livestock for our supply of seafood. The bottom line is that we could feed 1 billion more people with fish we currently feed to animals.⁶
Cultivating fish for pet consumption
At UMAMI Bioworks, we’re dedicated to bringing cultivated products from promise to reality without compromises. Based on fit with our mission, pet food is a natural extension of our existing portfolio
- Mihir Pershad, CEO of Umami Bioworks
Transforming the pet food supply chain is critical to making the agrifood system more sustainable. However, cats are obligate carnivores and trying to switch them to vegan diets is not a realistic solution in most cases. So the solution must be to find more sustainable ways to produce meat and fish for the pet food supply chain. We saw an opportunity to leverage our cultivated production solution to support the dietary needs and health of cats and dogs with sustainably produced fish without the negative consequences of overfishing.
At UMAMI Bioworks, we’re dedicated to bringing cultivated products from promise to reality without compromises. Our team continues our journey to deliver the first premium cultivated seafood products to restaurants with our partners by Q1 2025 — and we are well on track to meet that timeline. But when Marina Cat reached out to us with the opportunity to consider the pet food market, we found this to be a compelling path to deliver cultivated seafood to consumers more quickly. We are now working in partnership with Marina Cat to launch small-batch production this year and are targeting first commercial sales in 2024.
As a development and manufacturing platform company, we saw the opportunity to add pet food to our range of commercial applications as an obvious decision. Why? Strategically, pet food aligns with our focus on ETP (endangered, threatened, and protected) species, has a large market opportunity for cultivated product growth, and enables us to keep fish in the ocean while delivering healthy, sustainable seafood to our furry friends.
We can also deliver clear value to consumers by eliminating the less desirable aspects of traditional pet food. Cultivated fish is free from the common contaminants in ocean-caught seafood — mercury, cadmium, PCB and dioxins — as well as from microplastics and antibiotics. We can reduce transportation emissions by producing our pet food regionally, rather than shipping tuna from Southeast Asia to feed pets in the United States. And we’ve committed to proving this from day one: the cultivated fish in this collaboration with Marina Cat will be produced domestically in the US for the US product launch.
Pragmatically, our automated, modular production platform is also very well suited for taking on this challenge. Our tech platform allows for highly customizable products for pets. We can optimize the products to match desired amino acid profiles for wild-caught fish, and optimize our cell feed and cell lines to deliver flavors that are most palatable for pets. We can produce products with enriched levels of healthy omega-3 and omega-6 fats to meet desired product formulation targets. And best of all, we can translate this into our production system to deliver at scale.
Our production platform is built to support rapid adoption by traditional industry with a standardized, modular production line and ALKEMYST™, our machine learning toolkit for automation and optimization. Our technology is designed for drop-in deployment with minimal new engineering, design, and optimization required.
We’re thrilled to be working with cultivated pioneers Marina Cat and CULT Food Science to bring the first cultivated pet food to market and to be expanding the range of commercial applications for cultivated fish. As UMAMI continues to accelerate our global journey toward a sustainable seafood future, we are glad to be bringing our pets along for the ride.
For more details, check out the press release from CULT Food Science.
Citations
¹ Okin, Gregory S. Environmental Impacts of Food Consumption by Dogs and Cats. Edited by Mathew S. Crowther. PLOS ONE 12, no. 8 (August 2, 2017): e0181301. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181301.
² Ibid.
³ Su, B., Martens, P. & Enders-Slegers, M.-J. A neglected predictor of environmental damage: The ecological paw print and carbon emissions of food consumption by companion dogs and cats in China. J. Clean. Prod. 194, 1–11 (2018).
⁴ Jacqueline Alder, Brooke Campbell, Vasiliki Karpouzi, Kristin Kaschner, Daniel Pauly. “Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets”. Annual Review of Environment and Resources (2008) 33:1, 153-166.
⁵ Cashion, Tim, Frédéric Le Manach, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly. “Most Fish Destined for Fishmeal Production Are Food-Grade Fish.” Fish and Fisheries 18, no. 5 (September 2017): 837–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12209.
⁶ Sandström, V., Chrysafi, A., Lamminen, M. et al. Food system by-products upcycled in livestock and aquaculture feeds can increase global food supply. Nat Food 3, 729–740 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00589-6
