From AgFunder News:
From Burger King to Saudi prince: Bond founder on why cats & dogs could be cultured meat’s first mass consumers
Providing advertising makeovers and comms tips to a fast food giant used to gnaw at the moral fiber of former brand strategist Rich Kelleman.
“I was a vegan at Burger King,” he explains to AFN.
This was a decade ago, long before the days of vegan Impossible Whoppers. He felt sheer awkwardness and cognitive dissonance in helping to mass market something he personally objected to, he says. This feeling was at its most acute during meetings with his premier client, where steaming trays of meat-based products would float into boardrooms to be offered to all attendees – only for Kelleman to coyly refuse, before collaborating to convince others to gorge on them.
Eventually, he succumbed to Shakespearean advice: To thine own self be true. He left the ‘royal household,’ but stayed in the same city — Boulder, Colorado — where he and his wife bought a dog named Rumples.
That dog, though, was persistently carnivorous; Kelleman began to wonder each day, as he spooned out large and low-grade chunks of meat for Rumples’ delectation, if there might be a healthy way for pets like his to be vegan too.
There were reasons for avoiding the plant-based route. It’s harder for naturally carnivorous dogs and cats to get the right nutrients with plant-based options like soy, which could in fact block absorption and hamper digestion.
Inspired by early cultured protein trailblazers like Memphis Meats, Kelleman thought: “What about cultured meat for pets?”
The name’s Bond. Bond Pet Foods
By 2017, Kelleman founded cultured pet food company Bond Pet Foods, where he now serves as CEO.
Fast forward to September 2020, and the startup has just closed a bridge round of funding to accelerate its work, with follow-on capital from its seed investors Lever VC and KBW Ventures, and Stage 1 and Trellis Road coming aboard for the first time.....MUCH MORE
These investments, combined with the $1.2 million seed round previously reported by AFN, equates to a total of just under $2 million to date. The presence of KBW Ventures brings Kelleman under the auspices of a royal household very different from Burger King; KBW is an early-stage VC firm founded by the Saudi Arabian prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal....
I still think there is still potential in the solution proposed in the Gen Z post: reeducation camps for the reluctant.
And Greta. She seems sad these days what with Covid-19 sucking all the air out of the room.
Greta might want to run the camps.
She seems tough enough. Maybe in a few years jodhpurs and a riding crop, molding young minds.
