BioCraft Pet Nutrition, a biotech company developing cultivated animal ingredients for the pet food market, announces that it has received registration from the Austrian authorities to use its ingredients in the European Union.
There is currently no pre-market approval process in the EU for animal feed ingredients, but companies must meet legal requirements to ensure their products are safe and become registered users of animal byproducts. BioCraft has now met these obligations, meaning it can begin selling ingredients to EU pet food producers.
BioCraft has achieved legal status following rigorous studies conducted over a three-year period, which confirmed that the company’s ingredients are produced using stable, non-immortalized, non-genetically modified animal cells. They were also found to be free of pathogens, viruses, heavy metals, and biogenic amines (natural compounds produced by living cells that can have negative health effects when present at high concentrations).
Furthermore, the nutritional profile of the ingredients was found to be highly similar to that of the standard meat slurry used by pet food manufacturers, containing comparable levels of several key nutrients and a superior omega-6 to omega-3 ratio to that of conventional chicken slurry.
“Significant milestone for the industry”
BioCraft uses cultivated cells to produce an unstructured ingredient that does not require additional downstream processing. It can be used as a one-to-one replacement in wet or dry foods at similar inclusion levels to traditional slurry. The company’s first cultivated product is made with mouse cells, since small prey are said to be the ancestral diet of cats and dogs.
In 2023, BioCraft announced it was pioneering the use of AI to streamline the production of cultivated meat for pets. The technology meant that fewer experiments were needed to improve cell growth and enhance the nutritional value of cultivated meat.
Last year, BioCraft claimed its ingredients had reached price parity with traditional premium pet food products after the company developed a method of reutilizing nutrient-rich growth media in the final product. This eliminates waste and reduces the cost of acquiring and disposing of the media.
“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.”
