Biocraft Pet Nutrition has made a breakthrough in its production process that allows it to produce cultured mouse meat for dogs and cats at the same price as premium pet foods.
As reported by Green Queen, BioCraft (formerly Because Animals) says its cultured meat is currently selling for $2 to $2.50 per pound, on par with premium pet food meat. The company was able to achieve this milestone by rethinking the use of culture media to reduce costs and increase the nutritional value of the mouse meat.
“The only things holding back the adoption of cultured meat in the pet food industry were price parity and ensuring nutritional balance for pets. BioKraft has now achieved both,” said founder and CEO Shannon Falconer.
The startup now aims to have its cultured meat in branded pet food on store shelves by early 2026.
According to Green Queen, one of the key processes to reduce costs when producing cultured meat is to eliminate animal-derived materials and instead obtain nutrients from crops. This is also a focus for BioKraft, which has developed a nutrient medium made up of plant-based ingredients that are widely used in pet food and therefore have already been approved by food safety regulators.
In June 2023, BioCraft introduced a chicken cell line that can be used in both cat and dog food. The cell-cultured chicken comes as a meat slurry similar to that already used in the industry. Prior to developing the chicken cell culture line, BioCraft created mouse tissue in a test tube. Geneticists have studied mice for decades and have developed more knowledge of mouse DNA than most other animals. BioCraft's team applied that biochemical knowledge to create cell-cultured mouse meat for use as a new ingredient in cat treats.
Other cultured meat options in the pet food industry
Cell-cultured meat ingredients are becoming a reality in the pet food industry.
Meatly, a British company that recently announced in May that it had developed the world's first canned pet food using farmed chicken as a protein source, said it has developed a protein-free culture medium that costs £1 (US$1.26) per litre. Meatly's medium is free of serum, animal-derived components, steroids, hormones, growth factors and antibiotics, and is used in the company's suspension culture bioreactors without microcarriers. The absence of expensive proteins such as transferrin and insulin, growth factors and microcarriers makes it economically viable to produce Meatly's protein-free culture medium on an industrial scale. Meatly believes that further cost savings can be achieved by increasing the volume of medium purchased.
In February, Bond Petfoods shipped the first two tons of cell-cultured animal protein to Hill's Pet Nutrition as part of a collaboration announced in 2021. The two tons of cultured meat will allow Hill's to formulate and evaluate different products at its pet nutrition center in Topeka, Kansas. The data will be used for final ingredient review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, as well as to prepare prototypes for market evaluation. In April, Wilbur Ellis Nutrition and Bond Petfoods partnered to develop customized ingredients for pet food applications.
In Fall 2023, CULT Food Science introduced Noochies! brand, a line of freeze-dried, high-protein, high-nutrition pet treats made without industrial agriculture. Noochies! incorporates patent-pending ingredients Bmmune and Bflora, which are not derived from animal sources and are designed to enhance digestion, strengthen immune systems and the overall health of pets.
Czech startup Bene Meat Technologies received a certificate of registration from the European Feed Ingredients Register in November 2023, allowing it to produce and sell cultured meat for pet food. The company plans to open a new production facility this year to increase its capacity.
