Purina PetCare introduced a dog treat made from spent brewery grains.

The dog treat will be available only in their Netherlands market for a six-week trial run.

By-product from the brewing industry, such as yeast, have served as pet foodingredients since before the coining of the portmanteau “upcycling” in the1990s. Upcycling involves taking wasted or otherwise lower cost materials andcreating higher valued items. Beer brewing and alcoholic fermentation producewaste materials, including grains leached of their sugars in the brewingprocess. These spent grains still have nutritional value as a pet foodingredients.

On March 1, Purina PetCare introduced a dog treat made from spent brewerygrains. The dog treat will be available only in their Netherlands market for asix-week trial run. The new treat will be sold under the AdVENTuROS brand.After the trial period, Purina plans to gauge consumer reactions to determinefuture deployment and scale-up of the product.

“Upcycling means taking ingredients that otherwise would be wasted and turningthem into new nutritious products,” said Nestlé Purina EMENA director ofinsight and innovation Olena Topilnytska said in a press release. “Through theupcycling of surplus grains from breweries, we are able to create a nutritioustreat for dogs that reduces waste and provides a more sustainable option forconsumers.”

While some pet food ingredients made from upcycled brewery grains remain inthe tentative or experimental stage, others have been on the market fordecades. These articles on Petfood Industry explored how dog, cat and othercompanion animal diets can include upcycled ingredients from the brewing andfermenting industries.

Dried distillers grains may boost cat food palatability

Advances in processing of dried distillers grains (DDGs) have made them anattractive option for pet foods, especially cat foods, said Greg Aldrich,PhD, pet food program coordinator at Kansas State University.

“Next generation DDGs are comparable to soybean meal and may actually have anadvantage,” Aldrich said.

DDGs are left-overs from the production of ethanol, the type of alcohol usedas a human intoxicant or biofuel. Regardless of whether the alcohol is meantfor fuel tanks or getting people tanked, grains are fermented by yeast beforedistillation. In next-generation DDGs, the residues of that yeast may boostcat food palatability. In his previous research, Aldrich found that yeastproducts boost pet food palatability for cats.

‘Beautiful system’ supplies by-products to make pet food

Using otherwise-wasted ingredients from the humans food chain now serves toboost pet food industry sustainability. Before recycling even enteredthe English language in 1922, though, some pet food and animal feed ingredientcompanies reduced the amount of waste produced by reusing byproducts of thehuman food system, although the environmental benefits may have beencoincidental.

For example, 139 years ago the founder of F.L. Emmert started facilitating thetransport of beer brewing byproducts to dairy farms outside Cincinnati,Elizabeth Barber, F.L. Emmert Company executive vice president, said.Emmert makes pet food and livestock feed ingredients from brewers yeast. Ifthe yeast products weren’t used for cats, dogs and livestock, the nutritiousfungi would end up rotting in a landfill.

Scotch whisky co-product feeds algae for pet food omega-3

Leftovers from Scotch whisky distillation got another shot as nourishment foralgae that scientists processed into a pet food ingredient. Algae grown on potale, a co-product of the liquor industry, could replace fish as a source ofomega-3 fatty acids in both human and pet food, with potential ecologicaland economic benefits. Edinburgh-based MiAlgae developed a process forupcycling pot ale into algae alimentation.

Dried yeast may provide ‘gold standard’ pet food protein

Dried yeast left over from the production of ethanol, used as a biofueland in other industries, may provide palatability enhancement in pet food onpar with brewers’ yeast, Gary Davenport, PhD, companion animal technicalmanager for ADM Animal Nutrition. Additionally, dried yeast provides proteinsand their building blocks, amino acids, which means the desiccated fungusmay serve as a novel protein source to replace animal byproducts in dog andcat food formulations.

Source: Tim Wall Petfood Industry

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