Biotechnology company BRAIN AG and DIANA Pet Food, a partner for performance solutions in the pet food industry, member of the Symrise Group, have formed a strategic partnership in the field of taste science.
Through this unique strategic collaboration established for 5 years, the partners will work on different programs to study the mechanisms related to taste perception in cats. The joint goal of the first program is to use proliferating cat taste cells (CTC) for screening new ingredients which shall improve the palatability of pet food.
Always striving for innovation, DIANA Pet Food intends to benefit from BRAIN CTC-technology to develop cutting-edge palatability enhancers for cat food. This CTC-technology is deduced from the recently patented and published BRAIN human taste cell (HTC) technology, which is used by BRAIN for screening purposes to improve human food formulations in order to reduce e.g. calorie and salt intake with the diet. Nonetheless, human taste cell lines cannot be used for screening purposes in order to improve pet food palatability, as it is well accepted that human taste and flavor perceptions is far different from that of cats and dogs.
"In the field of pet food, there is high demand for palatability, which depends first and foremost on the pet sensory equipment and individual preferences and on the pet food sensorial properties," says Isabelle Guiller, global R&D director at DIANA Pet Food. "Through the implementation of the program, DIANA Pet Food in partnership with BRAIN, will generate new access routes to palatability performance in order to help pet food manufacturers achieve high quality and tasty pet food products."
Dr. Michael Krohn, Unit Head BioActives and Performance Biologicals at BRAIN AG states: "The combination of the CTC cell lines together with the BioCompActive natural molecule library from our BioArchive as a screening resource will help us to identify compounds which will increase the palatability of cat food. We are proud to use our technology in order to help our strategic partner DIANA Pet Food to improve the formulations of various cat food products."
The use of BRAIN innovative CTC-technology constitutes an additional way for DIANA Pet Food to support pet food manufacturers’ brands performance. While developing the scientific knowledge on cat taste mechanisms, DIANA Pet Food will be able to offer customers new efficient and targeted solutions bringing added value to pet food by satisfying cats, thus their owners.