BioCraft secures approval to sell lab-grown ingredients in EU

BioCraft Pet Nutrition, which has developed cultured meat technology for the pet food industry, is known for pioneering lab-grown mouse meat. Austrian authorities have approved its use of Category 3 Animal Byproducts (ABP) in the European Union. 

This approval, which applies to low-risk byproducts, marks a crucial step forward for the company and could be a significant development for pet food manufacturers.

Industry milestone

“Achieving ABP registration for an animal cell-based ingredient in the EU is a significant milestone for BioCraft and the industry as a whole,” says BioCraft CEO Dr. Shannon Falconer, who founded the firm in 2016 as Because Animals. It rebranded to BioCraft Pet Nutrition in 2023. 

Last year, Meatly became the first company in Europe to be approved to supply cultivated meat and the first globally to achieve authorization to sell cultivated pet food, although only in the UK. 

Safe and nutritious 

BioCraft’s registration “for the purpose of multiplying cells for the production of pet food” means that the company meets EU requirements for those wishing to supply ingredients to pet food manufacturers to ensure their safety. The approval has taken several years and involves stringent analysis of the company’s production processes. 

Additional third-party profiling found that the animal-cell cultured ingredient is nutritionally comparable to standard meat slurry typically used in pet food manufacturing. Levels of nutrients such as taurine, lysine and tryptophan were on par with meat slurry, while BioCraft’s ingredients had a higher ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 than chicken slurry. 

“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 (standard operating procedures) for every critical control point,” explains Falconer. “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.”

Easy swap

Because BioCraft’s unstructured ingredient from culture-grown animal cells requires no downstream processing, it can be used as a one-to-one replacement for meat slurry in wet or dry foods. 

Although the firm focuses mostly on mouse meat, the ancestral prey of cats and dogs, it added a chicken cell line in 2023 and announced last year that it had reached price parity with premium traditional meat. 

“Achieving price parity and a robust nutritional profile for pets were the only elements holding back cultivated meat for the pet food industry – and BioCraft has now achieved both,” Falconer says.