Co-creating sustainable pet food using high-quality bread meal

May 16 2022 - News

Our close partnerships with our customers and suppliers allows us to regularly explore the possibilities of innovative ingredients. Co-creation brings the benefit of testing out new ingredients for which we already have a reliable supply chain in place. A recent successful example is a dog biscuit introduced by our client Bubeck Petfood, created using sustainable bread meal from our supplier FeedValid.

Since starting in sales at IQI over 10 years ago, I have always had a good contact to FeedValid, including its chief material management officer Alexander Romme. FeedValid has supplied IQI with sustainable high-quality pet food ingredients, including dried potato products, since the partnership was formed more than 25 years ago. When Alexander told me about bread meal as an alternative to conventional starch sources to reduce the average carbon foot print of pet food, I was immediately interested

Bread meal as a sustainable ingredient

FeedValid is specialized in valorizing raw materials and process side streams from the human food industry into high-quality, innovative ingredients for different industries, including pet food. As part of this, FeedValid processes mono-streams of high-quality bread products from the bread production and processing industry. The product streams are separated on-site by FeedValid’s own equipment and are collected daily for further processing into bread meal with a consistent high quality and structure – essential for application in pet food. Bread meal has a high degree of gelatinization and high water binding capacity, perfect for application in snacks and treats, cold pelleted pet foods, and as an addition to fresh meat slurries to the extruder.

Use of bread meal

My colleague Yvette Gerritsen, one of our valued sales managers, proposed the use of bread meal to our longtime client Bubeck Petfood from Germany. IQI has been a key supplier to Bubeck, the oldest producer of dog food that still exists in the world, for over ten years. Her proposal immediately hit the spot with Bubeck’s managing director Kai Nagel, who has a great ambition to further increase sustainability of their dog snacks and treats by switching to more innovative, sustainable ingredients. As such, Bubeck was the first to switch to our new product Miscanthus fiber or Elephant grass, as a sustainable source of dietary fiber, and now from fresh raw wheat to bread meal.

Nutritional pet food ingredient

In close coordination with FeedValid we gave Bubeck samples of bread meal for testing. In contrast to the majority of pet food producers, Bubeck uses a backing process to produce their dog snacks and treats. The heat treatment of the backing process greatly improves the nutritional properties of wheat. Since bread meal is a pre-cooked and pregelatinized product, baking it again improves the digestibility and palatability even further. Furthermore, bread meal has a reduced risk of mycotoxin, making it a very safe ingredient.

Case study: bread meal

As the first product created with bread meal, in 2022 Bubeck will introduce a sustainable, highly digestible and palatable big baked dog biscuit. Would you like to know more about how Bubeck successfully switched to using bread meal created by FeedValid? Download our case study on the development of bread meal as a sustainable pet food ingredient.

Read all about our case study here

Special thanks to Kai Nagel of Bubeck Petfood and Alexander Romme of FeedValid for co-creating this sustainable new product.

About Roeland Vreeswijk

Roeland Vreeswijk is IQI Trusted Petfood Ingredient’s Sales Director and responsible for the sales in Europe and upcoming markets. Roeland is a driven and enthusiastic expert in the feed industry and has been with IQI for nearly 12 years already!