BENE MEAT TECHNOLOGIES IS BRINGING CULTURED MEAT TO THE PET FOOD INDUSTRY
In a recent technological advancement, Bene Meat Technologies announced the scalable manufacturing of grown meat ingredients for the pet food industry using animal cell lines.
Pet food will probably be the first economically significant mass-produced item, according to the firm.
Ingredients for pet food
The Prague-based food tech company, founded in 2020 and run by a group of Czech biotechnologists and food scientists, focuses on creating and commercializing technologies for the production of cultured meat on an industrial scale for the food and feed industries.
The food technology claims that during the course of its research and development on cultured meat, it has created a number of technologies and items that were not its main emphasis but may find new uses, such as ingredients for pet food.
Managing Director Roman Kříž explains: “A tasty, high-quality, visually attractive steak is the holy grail in developing cultured meat. However, on the research journey behind this sophisticated final product, our company generates a significant amount of knowledge and products with the possibility of new uses. These products were not our original focus, but now they are becoming an equal priority.
That is why we are intensively dedicated to the technology of producing raw materials for pet food.”
The demand for lab-raised beef for pet food
Production of pet food, according to Bene Meat Technologies, is energy and environmentally taxing. 25% of animal husbandry’s carbon footprint is attributable to the sector. The food tech continues, “A substantial number of individuals are willing to feed their pets with feed manufactured using cultivated meat, according to numerous surveys examining the market for cultured meat as pet food.
Laboratory meat ingredients a solution for the pet food industry
“According to our findings, this industry faces several challenges, ranging from increasing market regulation in terms of quality requirements, through fluctuating input prices, to complicated supply flows, and the contamination of products within the production process,” Kříž explains.
“We want to offer pet food producers a technology that allows them to produce the key components of the final feed in a bioreactor, economically, efficiently, humanely, with constant quality, and without the need to rely on suppliers,” he adds.
In early 2023, Bene Meat Technologies, which asserts to have created the required technology for growing meat, plans to file for regulatory permission in the US and the EU.