VIENNA, AUSTRIA — BioCraft Pet Nutrition, a biotech company producing cell-cultured ingredients for the pet food industry, announced that it has received registration from the Austrian authorities to use Category 3 Animal Byproducts (ABP) in the European Union, enabling it to begin selling ingredients to EU pet food producers. According to BioCraft, Austrian authorities granted the registration “for the purpose of multiplying cells for the production of pet food.”
There is currently no pre-market approval process in the European Union for animal feed ingredients — alternative, novel or otherwise, according to BioCraft. Due to this, companies wishing to sell animal-based ingredients to pet food manufacturers in Europe must meet legal requirements to ensure that the feed ingredients are safe, and become a registered user of animal byproducts in the region. BioCraft has now met its obligation as a Feed Business Operator and notified the EU Feed Material Register.
“Achieving ABP registration for an animal cell-based ingredient in the European Union is a significant milestone for BioCraft and the industry as a whole,” said Shannon Falconer, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of BioCraft. “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.”
Achieving 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. A team of veterinary, food safety and food science experts, both in-house and third party, generated safety data following dossier requirements for an EU Feed Additive to demonstrate the safety and quality of BioCraft’s product, according to the company.
Studies to complete the comprehensive plan, which were performed over a three-year period, confirmed that BioCraft’s ingredients are produced using stable, non-immortalized, non-genetically modified animal cells; free of bacterial pathogens, viruses including retroviruses, mycotoxins, molds, and yeasts; and free of biogenic amines and heavy metals. Additional third-party profiling of more than 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, according to BioCraft. In particular, results demonstrated comparable levels of key nutrients, such as taurine, lysine, methionine and tryptophan, and also showed a superior Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of BioCrafts ingredient to that of the chicken slurry.
“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 European pet food manufacturer BioCraft is working with. “BioCraft’s HACCP plan detailing safety and nutritional quality are an additional assurance that its ingredients are ready to be developed into healthy products that our cats and dogs will enjoy.”
Read more about the latest advancements in cultivated meat in pet nutrition.
