US startup Bond Pet Foods has welcomed German flavour and chemicals giant Symrise as an investor, with the firms partnering to create new precision-fermented products for pet nutrition.
Symrise, a global leader in flavours and functional ingredients, has invested in Colorado-based Bond Pet Foods to greenify the pet nutrition sector with planet-friendly proteins.
Bond Pet Foods makes recombinant animal proteins via precision fermentation for dogs and cats, eschewing the vast amounts of land and chemical inputs required to produce conventional options like chicken and lowering the process’s emissions.
“This investment marks an important step in advancing our strategy to develop next-generation sustainable ingredients with biotechnology,” said Diego Maurizio, general manager of the palatability and nutrition business line at Symrise.
“By combining Bond’s fermentation capabilities with Symrise’s application expertise and market insight, we can deliver high-performance nutrition solutions and create new growth opportunities for our customers.”
How Bond Pet Foods makes its precision-fermented proteins
Founded in 2017, Bond Pet Foods has raised over $20M in total funding, and specialises in precision-fermented meats like chicken, turkey and beef for pet food applications. It harvests these proteins to better meet the nutritional requirements of pets, supplying the ingredients to manufacturers of pet food, treats and supplements.
Precision fermentation involves inserting a specific molecular sequence into microbes to teach them to produce the desired molecules when fermented. It’s a process often described as similar to beer brewing.
Bond Pet Foods sources a sample of chicken DNA and combines it with brewers’ yeast, a rich source of protein, complex B vitamins, amino acids and minerals.
It introduces feedstocks to nourish the starter culture in fermentation tanks, before harvesting the brewed chicken protein at peak flavour and nutritional value within 48 hours. This is then gently dried and milled into a fine powder for use in a variety of applications, including both dry and wet pet food.
Bond Pet Foods has already been developing a precision-fermented ingredient for Hill’s Pet Food, a subsidiary of Colgate-Palmolive. It has so far produced 10 tonnes of protein for evaluation by its partners and the US Food and Drug Administration, whose Center for Veterinary Medicine oversees novel pet food regulation in the country.
Symrise’s equity investment, which will complement the German firm’s existing pet food portfolio, is earmarked as a move to speed up the commercialisation of next-generation pet nutrition solutions.
“This investment advances our ambition to scale biotechnology across our business. With this, we aim at effectively supporting long-term resilience, portfolio diversification, and a stronger innovation pipeline,” said Walter Ribeiro, president of Symrise’s Taste, Nutrition & Health division.
“This partnership marks an important step in advancing our technology. Our teams will work together to create new ingredients for our product pipeline, combining Symrise’s expertise in pet nutrition, palatability, and applications development to deliver additional value for manufacturers while enhancing pet health,” Bond Pet Foods founder and CEO Rich Kelleman said in a LinkedIn post.
Low-carbon pet food on the rise
Through the partnership, Symrise will leverage Bond Pet Foods’s technology to address key industry challenges, including supply chain continuity and the diversification of the sources of pet food ingredients.
For manufacturers, this will broaden access to high-quality proteins while supporting resilience and responsible sourcing. “By helping our customers develop more sustainable pet food formulations, the collaboration reinforces Symrise’s sustainability commitments and consumer-driven innovation strategy,” said Ribeiro.
Bond Pet Foods’s proteins have been shown to offer a host of nutritional benefits for dogs. Last year, a six-month study revealed that its precision-fermented chicken protein has a positive impact on digestion, the intestine and gut microbiome, and faecal metabolites.
“We have put great effort into building a new way to produce animal-identical proteins for pet food applications. Now, we find it exciting to see that work gaining traction across the industry,” said Kelleman. “Partnering with Symrise marks an important step forward, bringing their deep expertise in pet nutrition and taste to further expand how our ingredients perform and can be used by pet food manufacturers.”
It came amid rising interest in low-carbon pet food – research has revealed that animal-free pet food is the most effective measure to tackle the climate footprint of dogs and cats, even when accounting for the fact that most conventional pet food uses animal byproducts.
It’s why several food tech companies are innovating in this space. Germany’s Marsapet has rolled out a kibble product for dogs using Calysta’s gas-fermented FeedKind protein in Europe, and MicroHarvest’s microbial protein is used in treats made by UK pet food brand The Pack and Germany’s Vegdog.
Others are taking the cultivated meat approach. London-based Meatly received approval to sell its cell-cultured chicken in the UK in 2024, and debuted its ingredient in retail stores last year. US startup Friends & Family Pet Food Company has obtained clearance in Singapore and sold its Kampung bird treats at a trade show this month.
And Australia’s Magic Valley rolled out a pet food brand, Rogue Pet, and has begun offering its treats in the country. Plus, Bene Meat Technologies, Biocraft Pet Nutrition and Umami Bioworks have registered their cultivated meat as feed materials in the EU, allowing them to sell their products as pet food ingredients.
