BioCraft, a biotech company specialising in animal cell-cultured ingredients for the pet food market, has received approval from Austrian authorities to use Category 3 Animal Byproducts within the EU, enabling it to supply ingredients to EU pet food producers

Its first cultured cell-based ingredient is made from mouse cells, a traditional prey for both cats and dogs. BioCraft creates an unstructured ingredient from these cultures that requires no additional downstream processing, offering a nutritional profile and consistency similar to the meat slurry commonly used by pet food producers.

There is currently no pre-market approval process in the EU for animal feed ingredients, alternative, novel or otherwise. Companies wishing to sell animal-based ingredients to pet food manufacturers must meet legal requirements to ensure that the feed ingredients are safe and become a registered user of animal byproducts in the EU.

BioCraft has been granted that registration by authorities in Austria for “the purpose of multiplying cells for the production of pet food”.

Achieving this status requires both registration by authorities and a demonstration of the ingredient’s safety and quality. Over a three-year period, BioCraft’s products have undergone rigorous checks by a team of veterinary, food safety and food science experts, both in-house and third-party.

These evaluations confirmed that BioCraft’s ingredients are made from stable, non-immortalised, non-genetically modified animal cells and are free from bacterial pathogens, viruses, biogenic amines (which can have negative health effects at high concentrations) and heavy metals.

“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 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."

She continued: "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”.

BioCraft has fulfilled its obligations as a Feed Business Operator and has notified the EU Feed Material Register. Additional third-party profiling of over 100 nutrients revealed that BioCraft’s animal-cell cultured ingredient closely matches the nutritional profile of the standard 'meat slurry' currently used by pet food manufacturers.