This episode was recorded at the 2025 Petfood Forum in Kansas City, Missouri.
Panelists introduce themselves and their backgrounds (00:45)
Dr. Starkey describes the Auburn University pet food research and teaching program. Their goal is to teach students food science research techniques while upcycling low economic value meat processing co-products into high value, marketable pet products. (4:46)
Leila shares about why she chose Auburn for her undergraduate career, how she got involved in the pet food program, and her experience at the Imaginarium event at Auburn. This event brought the pet food and poultry processing industries together for knowledge exchange and hands-on learning about the two industries. Leila looks forward to working in the pet food industry after graduation. (8:16)
Ileana talks about her graduate research using insect protein meal to create pet treats. She combined various ratios of cricket meal and chicken liver with structure-forming technology from sodium alginate and encapsulated sodium lactate from Balchem to create jerky-style pet treats. She will conduct sensory panels with pet owners to evaluate their perceptions of the treats for their animals. She goes on to talk about some of the challenges she experienced with using insect proteins. Dr. Starkey notes that while the cricket meal is high in protein, it remains to be seen how digestible it is given the high chitin content of the exoskeleton. (10:55)
Dr. Starkey gives some of the rationale behind including the chicken liver as an ingredient in the treats in Ileana’s research. She notes that the extra moisture from the liver binds really well with the structure-forming technology to yield a really nice, gelled product even with the high chitin content. (19:43)
Scott asks Dr. Starkey to talk a bit more about the Imaginarium event. It included speakers on the economic values of co-products and market survey data, among other topics, and hands-on stations for participants to make products that Auburn had previously worked with in their research. They also had a pet food vs human food challenge where participants had to choose whether a product was for pets or humans based on visual appearance alone. (23:54)
Dr. Starkey shares about the next steps in the Auburn pet food research program, and Ileana describes a graduate internship she did at Big Creek Foods. (32:17)
Please subscribe and share with your industry friends to invite more people to join us at the Real Science Exchange - Companion Animal virtual pub table.
If you want one of our Real Science Exchange t-shirts, screenshot your rating, review, or subscription, and email a picture to anh.marketing@balchem.com. Include your size and mailing address, and we’ll mail you a shirt.