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‘World's first’ complete dog food with cultivated meat hits EU market

Italian brand Forza10 has launched a complete wet dog food that the company claims is the first commercially launched pet food containing cultivated meat.

Developed in partnership with Czech biotech company BeneMeat, Coolty Meat contains 26% cultivated meat and is formulated as a monoprotein without the use of antibiotics, hormones, or preservatives.

Launched in May, it is likely to be pitched in particular at owners who have dogs with intolerances.

“[Cultivated] meat allows us to combine high nutritional quality, digestibility, and safety in one ingredient,” said Forza10 brand representative Gianandrea Guidetti.

“Collaborating with BeneMeat has allowed us to work with an innovative ingredient that matches our emphasis on quality and a scientific approach to animal nutrition.”

Cultivated meat: ‘Rewriting the rules’ of pet nutrition

The cells for making the cultivated meat are derived from small rodents.

“The digestive physiology of domestic carnivores is optimised to metabolise the proteins and lipids found in small mammals,” the Forza10 website reads.

The rodents offer a “balanced essential amino acid profile” and “low allergenic risk”, it adds.

Posting on social media after the launch, Guidetti said the company was “rewriting the rules of pet nutrition”.

He added: “Supported by the international Nasta Pet Food [the European consortium of natural pet food manufacturers] we are proving that commercial biotechnology in pet food is a reality.

“We aren't just creating a new product; we are opening a brand-new pathway for functional, hypoallergenic, and deeply sustainable nutrition.”

Carbon study shows benefits of cultivated meat

Earlier in May, BeneMeat published a peer-reviewed life cycle assessment (LCA) showing that “cultivated meat, when produced at scale, can offer a comparable or lower environmental footprint than conventional chicken, particularly when key inputs and energy sources are optimised”.

The study, published in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, quantified environmental hotspots and compared the cultivated meat from BeneMeat against conventional meats. The LCA was based on pilot-scale data and a facility producing 400 to 600kg of cultivated meat per day.

The authors, from the Czech Technical University in Prague and BeneMeat, said their findings “indicate that BeneMeat is making significant progress in its mission to produce not only economically viable but also environmentally friendly CM [cultivated meat]”.

They suggested that emissions could be lowered further through minimising the effects of key inputs such as soy protein isolate (SPI) and glucose, as well as using more renewable energy in the production facility.

Elliot Swartz, principal scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute (GFI), welcomed the findings, which show that “small-scale CM production today can have lower land use than all conventional meat production and can be competitive with conventional chicken/pork production on carbon footprint (significantly lower than beef, even dairy beef)”.

He noted that water use was similar or slightly higher for cultivated meat.

“[This] can be explained by BeneMeat's intention to sell spent media for revenue rather than recycle the water. Energy demand for CM was higher than conventional meat production, which aligns with prior work, but lower than previous cultivated LCA estimates,” he added.