Raw pet foods are growing in popularity, as owners seek ways to improve the health of their pets. To help prevent risks to public health, new ways are being sought to ensure these foods don’t become a significant route into people’s homes for pathogenic bacteria, like Salmonella.
Prof. Rob Kingsley from the Quadram Institute is partnering with a raw pet food manufacturer and using funding from FSRN to deploy natural killers of bacteria, bacteriophages, to provide a safe intervention to be used during processing to reduce Salmonella risks from raw pet foods. If these bacteriophage cocktails show promise in this sector, the findings could be applied to other food production settings.