Patent Gives Insight into Pet Food Ingredients

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Petcare companies have for many years provided commercial petfoods to various markets around the world. Commercial petfood products are designed to be nutritious, but are also required to be highly palatable to ensure the animal consumes sufficient volume to receive its nutritional requirements, and to ensure the pet owner is satisfied that the product is ‘satisfying’ the animal’s needs.

One of the aesthetic drawbacks of traditional commercial petfoods is that they have been perceived by pet owners as ‘artificial’, and by inference, not as healthy or satisfying for the animal. This perception may exist quite independently of the actual nutritional or sensory performance of the products.

Therefore, to enhance the owner’s perception of these products, there has always been a need to provide a ‘meat-like’ texture in commercial petfoods, in order to provide ‘real food’ cues to the owner of the pet and to provide satisfying texture to the animal.

To provide the ‘muscle meat’ texture that is desirable, but on a cost-effective basis, commercial petfood manufacturers have developed various technologies to make manufactured meat analogues, or meat-like chunks. This is often done by utilizing the binding functionality of selected raw material to form an integral mass from comminuted meat and/or cereal slurries via various processes. The recent evolution of this technology is summarized as follows:

1970’s
Lower-moisture extruded vegetable protein has been used as a ‘chunk’ in packaged foods. It has a ‘meaty’ internal texture, but does not have good palatability, particularly for felines. Also, the requirement for high levels of sulfur in the recipe is a drawback in relation to its undesirable impact on the product and packaging aesthetics.

Meat slurries were created from low-grade meat offals, cooked in gas ovens and cut into chunks. However, these chunks tended to be not as palatable as muscle meat and did not display a satisfactorily ‘meaty’ internal texture.

Lung lobes have been cut to resemble muscle meat. However the sorting and trimming required to obtain the lobes themselves, as well as the poor recovery of lung chunks through high-volume size reduction processes, and the further poor recovery of chunk size post canning, are significant drawbacks for this technique.

1980’s
Meat analogue chunks manufactured from meat slurries were made resilient via the use of materials with binding properties such as cereal starch/konjac/alginate/pectin. However, many of these chunks lacked realistic texture, especially internally. Some of the binders also tended to be relatively expensive.

1990’s
‘Steam-Set Meat’ (SSM) chunks formed from slurries cooked in steam ovens and cut into chunks, particularly utilizing the water binding ability of such materials as egg white, blood plasma, soy protein isolate, selected chicken pieces, cereal binders and gelling agents to provide resilience. The chunks themselves were not superior to the gas-oven chunks, however this technique was preferred to gas-oven cooking due to the elimination of fires and due to lower maintenance costs.

SSM chunks are also prone to degradation during mixing and filling operations, and lack a realistic ‘meaty’ internal texture. They also require a complex multi-stage manufacturing process, and depend on the binding ability of high cost ingredients such as blood plasma and wheat gluten and muscle meats for resilience.

2000’s
Tallow is typically obtained from commercial rendering plants, where mammal by-products not directed to the human or pet foods streams are processed. Recently, however, concerns have grown regarding the introduction of ‘specific risk materials’ (SRM’s) into the mammalian food stream. These materials include spleen, brain, and spinal cord, and are associated with degenerative diseases such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). As these materials are often processed by renderers, there is a significant risk that these materials may be incorporated into commercial lower-moisture petfoods, with a potential long-term health risk for the animal. Therefore, it would be advantageous to develop an alternative, low-cost fat source that is free of BSE risk.