Policy and non-profit work
In 2005, Nick Cooney founded The Humane League in Philadelphia, a non-profit organization that works to protect animal welfare. [14] Cooney is one of several people who provided information used in the writing of the book Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism (2008) by Mark Hawthorne.
Since then, Nick Cooney's work promoting alternative proteins and animal protection has been featured in media outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Quartz, Upside, Food Navigator, Just-Food, and the Wall Street Journal. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] He has lectured internationally at conferences and campuses including Harvard, [21] Yale, [22] in Luxembourg, [23] and in Washington, D.C. [24] [25]
Cooney previously worked as campaign coordinator at the non-profit Farm Sanctuary and as executive vice president at non-profit Mercy for Animals. He is currently a director with the non-profit Lever Foundation. [26] [27]
Bruce Gregory Friedrich is co-founder and president of The Good Food Institute (GFI), a Y Combinator funded non-profit that promotes plant- and cultivated meat alternatives to conventional animal meat. He is also a co-founder of the alternative protein venture capital firm New Crop Capital. Friedrich previously worked for PETA and Farm Sanctuary.
Paul Shapiro is an American animal welfare writer who authored the 2018 book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. He's also the CEO and cofounder of The Better Meat Co. and the host of the Business for Good Podcast. He has delivered five TEDx talks relating to sustainable food and animal welfare. Prior to publishing Clean Meat, he was known for being an animal protection advocate, both as the founder of Animal Outlook and a Vice President at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
Animal-free agriculture, also known as veganic agriculture, stockfree farming or veganic farming, consists of farming methods that do not use animals or animal products.
New Harvest is a donor-funded research institute dedicated to the field of cellular agriculture, focusing on advances in scientific research efforts surrounding cultured animal products. Its research aims to resolve growing environmental and ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock production.
Matthew Michael Ball is an American animal activist. He is co-founder and President of One Step for Animals.
Gousto, a trading name of SCA Investments Limited, is a British meal kit retailer, headquartered in Shepherd's Bush, London, founded by Timo Boldt and James Carter. Gousto supplies subscribers with recipe kit boxes which include ready-measured, fresh ingredients and easily followed recipes.
Josh Balk is the co-founder and CEO of The Accountability Board. Previously, he was vice president of farm animal protection for The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) farm animal division. In addition, he is a cofounder of JUST, a food technology company. Prior to working with HSUS and founding JUST, he was known for his work at Animal Outlook. Balk is best known for leading successful legislative campaigns for farm animals, along with his work with food companies in enacting animal welfare policies that include eliminating gestation crates for breeding pigs and battery cages for chickens. He is also known for his work with the food industry to shift its focus onto plant-based foods.
Veggie Grill is a fast-casual vegan restaurant chain that operates in California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. The first restaurant opened in 2006 in Irvine, California and is operating 29 restaurants as of February 2018. The chain focuses on offering only plant-based food, with no meat, dairy, eggs, LDL cholesterol, animal fat or trans fat.
Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) is an international grassroots network of animal rights activists founded in 2013 in the San Francisco Bay Area. DxE uses disruptive protests and non-violent direct action tactics, such as open rescue of animals from factory farms. Their intent is to build a movement that can eventually shift culture and change social and political institutions. DxE activists work to "put an end to the commodity status of animals."
Impossible Foods Inc. is a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. The company's signature product, the Impossible Burger, was launched in July 2016 as a vegan alternative to beef hamburger.
This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture.
The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs. It was created in 2016 by the nonprofit organization Mercy For Animals with Bruce Friedrich as the chief executive officer. GFI has more than 150 staff across six affiliates in the United States, India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Europe. GFI was one of Animal Charity Evaluators' four "top charities" of 2022.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Novameat is a food tech startup that works with plant-based foods, including plant-based meat substitutes. According to El País, the company was responsible in 2018 for creating a meat substitute through 3D printing, whereby a plant-based paste was used with syringes placed in a 3D printer using AutoCAD software.
Perfect Day, Inc. is a food technology startup company based in Berkeley, California, that has developed processes of creating dairy proteins, including casein and whey, by fermentation in microbiota, specifically from fungi in bioreactors, instead of extraction from bovine milk.
Miyoko Schinner is an American vegan chef, vegan activist, social entrepreneur, cookbook author, and cooking show chef. She is currently the host of the YouTube cooking show, The Vegan Good Life with Miyoko.
A vegan school meal or vegan school lunch or vegan school dinner or vegan hot lunch is a vegan option provided as a school meal. The meals have become part of the menu in some public school districts. Vegan school meals most reported on by the media include those added by Los Angeles, California in 2018, Portland, Maine in 2019, and New York City in 2022. A small number of private educational facilities around the world are vegan schools and serve exclusively vegan food.
Ethan Walden Brown is an American executive, who is the founder, president and CEO of Beyond Meat. Before founding Beyond Meat, Brown worked on alternative energy and electricity grid restructuring at the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices before joining fuel cell manufacturer Ballard Power Systems.
Matthew Glover is a British businessman and co-founder of the Veganuary movement, which his wife Jane Land helped to create. He is the founder of Veg Capital, which helps fund technologies developing plant-based, fermented and cultivated alternative proteins.
Mirai Foods is a food technology company which produces cultivated meat from beef cells. It is headquartered in Wädenswil in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland, and was founded in 2019.
