BioCraft Pet Nutrition, a biotech developing animal cell-cultured ingredients for the pet food market, has received registration from the Austrian authorities to use Category 3 animal byproducts (ABP) in the EU.
The registration enables it to begin selling ingredients to EU pet food producers.
Austrian authorities granted BioCraft the registration for the purpose of multiplying cells to produce pet food. The biotech said it has now met its obligation as a feed business operator and it has notified the EU Feed Material Register.
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“Achieving ABP registration for an animal cell-based ingredient in the EU is a significant milestone for BioCraft and the industry as a whole,” said BioCraft founder and CEO Dr Shannon Falconer. “This comprehensive safety analysis goes well beyond regulatory compliance and provides a meticulous breakdown of our feed safety protocols, including stringent supplier verification processes, traceability documentation, risk assessments, and SOPs for every critical control point. We’ve implemented rigorous quality control measures and transparency across our supply chain, and the result is the highest industry standards for safety and integrity in alternative protein production.”
“Pet food producers are following this market space eagerly because there is a need for more ingredients that are supply-chain stable, sustainable, scalable, safe, and ethical,” said Patricia Heydtmann, quality and product development director at Partner in Pet Food, a pet food manufacturer, which is investigating options together with BioCraft.
BioCraft outlined how this legal status requires both registration by authorities and a demonstration of the ingredient’s safety and quality vis-à-vis a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan (Regulation 183/2005).
A team of veterinary, food safety and food science experts, both in-house and third party, generated safety data.
The company reported that additional studies performed over a three-year period confirmed that its ingredients are produced using stable, non-immortalized, non-genetically modified animal cells; free of bacterial pathogens, viruses including retroviruses, mycotoxins, moulds, and yeasts; and free of biogenic amines (natural compounds produced by living cells that can have negative health effects when present at high concentrations) and heavy metals.
Additional third-party profiling of over 100 nutrients revealed a highly similar nutritional profile between BioCraft’s animal-cell cultured ingredient and standard ‘meat slurry’ currently used by pet food manufacturers.
The biotech said that results also demonstrated comparable levels of key nutrients, such as taurine, lysine, methionine and tryptophan, but showed a superior omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of BioCraft’s ingredient to that of conventional ‘chicken slurry.’
BioCraft produces an unstructured ingredient from culture-grown animal cells that does not require additional downstream processing.
The biotech maintains that with a nutritional profile and consistency like the meat slurry pet food producers already use, its ingredient can be used as a one-to-one replacement in wet or dry foods at similar inclusion levels to traditional slurry.
BioCraft’s first cultured cell-based ingredient is made with mouse cells – the ancestral small prey diet of both cats and dogs.
Credit: feednavigator.com
