Balancing innovation, sustainability and food fraud

Gelling agents and thickeners

Wet pet food texture demanded by pet owners and that our pets enjoy eating requires the use of a wide range of ‘natural’ gelling agents and thickeners. Most are subject to environmental changes beyond our direct control, including the El Niño-effect on the supply of seaweed used in carrageenan manufacture and the effect of monsoons on guar and cassia gum supply. The El Niño-effect highlights the critical importance of sustainable raw material supply to ensure continuity of pet food supply into the retail chain and our pets bowls.

In dealing with environmental change, ensuring continuity of gels and thickeners supply requires adoption of different strategies. In the short-term, some petfood companies might stockpile these critical ingredients to combat against supply constraints. However, due to cost and potential loss of quality (functionality), this is not a viable, sustainable long-term strategy. Alternative options include using more sustainable raw materials and product reformulation.

Keeping our dog bowls full

Sustainability is interpreted differently by economists, politicians, scientists and sociologists and this can result in confusion as to who is responsible. For example, in a petfood company some might argue that ensuring sustainable raw material supply is the responsibility of the purchasing department. However, this is a narrow-minded view. Ensuring raw materials sustainability for both existing products and new products requires R&D to specify materials which can be purchased on a sustainable basis. 

New product development is carried out for many reasons, including: 

• new technology or ingredients
• to overcome raw materials supply problems e.g. environmental or legislation changes 
• to meet new pet owners demands e.g. health and wellbeing
• to refresh product portfolios that are looking tired and outdated

Successful market implementation

To maximize the chance of successful market implementation, project management models are used through the project life-cycle to assess if a project should proceed. 

These make ‘go/no go’ decisions at a series of ‘gates’ against critical success factors (CSF) e.g.:

does the concept scale up from pilot plant to factory?

is the product performance acceptable (palatability, digestibility, texture etc)?

can we make it profitable on a commercial scale?

All products have a life cycle and must be available throughout this time. This also requires a sustainable supply of novel and existing raw materials specified by new product development (NPD). 

However, in many cases sustainability criteria are not considered in project management and the risk of project failure increases, wasting NPD resources. 

A short case study

The case study illustrates how innovation can solve a problem and drive sales growth. However, a scenario is also presented where sustainability has not been considered, increasing the risk of project failure as well as, unfortunately, introducing the possibility of food fraud (adulteration). 

Faeces quality in wet dog food

Typically, wet pet food recipes include a range of different gels and thickeners, added as a commercial proprietary blend or as separate ingredients. 

These fulfill a wide range of functionality:

suspending oven formed chunks, meats, herbs, vegetables or pasta

filling viscosity (filling of wet petfood chunks or meats into containers before sterilisation)

finished product texture (gel, sauce or gravy)

Formulations for chunks-in-jelly, chunks-in-loaf, pate and terrine products might include guar gum (for fill viscosity) in combination with carrageenan and either locust bean gum, cassia gum or konjac mannan (singly or in combination) to form a gel.

In addition to these criteria, these ingredients must also be palatable (cats) and contribute to ‘good’ faeces quality (dogs). It is widely known that guar gum is a contributory factor to the problem of poor faeces quality and one reason why a dog owner might not feed wet pet food. R&D seeks to optimize guar gum levels in wet dog food and to develop other solutions that improve faeces quality e.g. use of fiber. 

As outlined above, gels and thickeners are used in combination to satisfy many criteria and it is a holy grail to develop a novel gel that contributes both viscosity and gelling ability. With specialist expertise and access to different qualities of gels, this can be done and achieve beneficial guar gum optimisation and improved faeces quality. 

However, due to lack of expertise or raw material availability constraints, achieving both viscosity and gelling is challenging. This can result in a scenario that is not sustainable as some suppliers might not be able to supply the quality required or might commit food fraud to do this. To meet the dual criteria of viscosity and gelling, a supplier might adulterate a material to artificially increase viscosity with one not specified by the pet food manufacturer. In doing so they are committing food fraud and this situation has happened previously in the industry.

Minimising risk through stakeholder involvement

Balancing innovation, sustainability and combating food fraud requires a team effort in which many stakeholders including R&D, operations, purchasing and raw materials suppliers must be involved. This case study highlights the importance of including sustainability criteria for NPD project evaluation. If this is not done, the outcome might be one which is not sustainable and where food fraud risks increase. Neither scenario is desirable for your pet food business or our pets.