In recent years the pet food and pet products market has seen consumer behavior change dramatically. Animals that used to be seen as pets have become part of the family, in a process that has become known as pet humanization. As a consequence of this movement, companies have been forced to prepare themselves to meet the new and ever-changing market demands, creating more challenges, especially for food formulators.
We saw that the pandemic had an impact on the spending habits of the guardians: as many were at home, there was an increase in the monthly expenses with their animals. What was seen, from that moment on, is that this increase in spending is here to stay. Unlike other shopping routines acquired during home confinement, buying pet products, and especially pet food, has become equivalent to caring for a family member, and this close relationship is not expected to diminish over time.
Similarly, humanization brought a diversification of the diet of dogs and cats, and often the guardians themselves started to mirror their own consumption habits in their animals. The search for alternatives to enhance meals as pleasant experiences, the search for intelligent packaging formats, mainly focused on product freshness, as well as the search for natural and healthy ingredients in the composition of marketed products were some examples of recent trends in the pet food market.
It is certain that the very role of the animal nutritionist and formulator has become even more crucial to this new demand. New raw materials, the need to always be researching and creating new formulas, not to mention the need to always be updating and learning new concepts. In the following article we will bring you a brief introduction to the concepts we mentioned above, as well as the obstacles that formulators may encounter along the way. Check it out!
The humanization of animals
To understand all this moment of change, it is necessary to know what the humanization of animals is. In the not so distant past, pets, especially cats and dogs, were adopted or bought by families to serve as company for the family, and, in the case of larger dogs, to guard the house.
However, with the digital age on the rise, guardians have begun to assign human characteristics to their four-legged friends, and this has had an overwhelming effect, changing the social, alimentary, consumer, and marketing behavior of the pet industry for good.
The humanization of animals is so strong that it is easy to find even people’s names being given to pets, in an even greater attempt to make them members of the family. In addition, commercial establishments have begun to accept the presence of furry animals in their environments, becoming pet friendly.
Not to mention the various manifestations of personification, such as the use of baby seats for the animals to use, the dyeing of their nails and fur, the use of clothes, the way they are treated, calling them sons and daughters, among many other examples.
The changing pet food
This behavioral change, however, set off a warning signal about the way pets were being fed. This is because when there was not so much information about the benefits and harms of certain human foods in the animal’s organism, many guardians gave (and still give) any kind of food, damaging the animal’s health.
A survey conducted by Mintel in 2015 found startling numbers regarding this wrong pattern of giving any food to pets. The survey was done in European countries and found that in Germany, for example, 69% dguardians gave some kind of snack/treat to their dog or cat, in Spain the number reached 65%.
With the increase in the number of pets with obesity, diabetes, and other types of diseases, pet owners have become more concerned about their pet’s diet, and this is where pet food formulators come in with a role to offer products that are made in a healthier way and adapted to each dietary restriction.
The Challenges for Policy Makers
One of the essential stimuli for companies to seek new, more appropriate formulas in their foods is that the consumer market, concerned about the health of pets, is increasingly interested in buying. The possibility of using ingredients also used in human food is becoming increasingly present on the shelves and products for dogs and cats.
In addition, a new range of products that aim to offer a different experience to the animal, either to entertain or arouse curiosity, has brought a trend of foods with different shapes and textures, marketed not only in the traditional dry extruded form.
This means that it’s a huge challenge to find new quality solutions to compete for buyers’ taste. In the quest to make feed more specific, there are those made from organic ingredients, those with natural digestive enzymes, those that are not genetically modified, not to mention, of course, those that focus on the size of the animal, its weight, some kind of disease (such as obesity), and even the coat type.
Challenge to maintain quality
It is not difficult to find guardians who prefer to pay more for a pet food product in order to have the guarantee that the food is of quality and focused on the nutritional needs of the animal.
However, for the company it is costly to maintain such specific formulations, so it is necessary to modernize the production line and add ways that contribute to the process of elaboration, analysis, study, and manipulation of the composition of new recipes and/or alternative raw materials that will compose the rations.
We have already shown you here in Optimal’s blog the impact that the automation of processes within the food industry causes in the entire production chain, which improves from product quality to the expenses with unprofitable processes. Always good to highlight that the more flexible and able to enable the formulator to re-optimize their formulations, mathematical optimization software become great allies for a greater effectiveness for superior results.
Constant change
The humanization of animals took place in the midst of the technological explosion that began at the end of the last century. This does not mean that the market will remain stagnant in this reality for a while, on the contrary. The tendency is that more and more people will worry about their pets and look for healthy, sustainable alternatives that increasingly tend to have traces, ingredients, and characteristics of human food.
So the companies that specialize in feed formulation must be steps ahead of the market to be able to meet the new needs when they arrive.
