Personalised nutrition
Pet food vs. human food
Premiumisation has driven our industry to rapidly transfer global food trends from human nutrition to pet foods (e.g. ‘superfoods’, grain-free, Palaeolithic diets). Products in these market segments serve the needs of pet parents as they replicate food purchasing decisions to aid health and wellbeing made for themselves into foods they choose for their pets.
However, as an industry we no longer just follow human food trends but are increasingly developing novel and innovative market segments.
Personalised diets
Personalised medicine is a hot topic in human health and recent innovations in individually tailored diets for pets expand on this concept in a novel direction. As nutritionists we have long understood that nutritional requirements are affected by an almost endless list of factors (e.g. age, sex, and lifestyle).
Therefore logic suggests there may be merit in providing diets that attempt to account for this individual variation in nutrient requirements. Parallels do exist in human foods but they only provide a small proportion of a person’s daily caloric intake (i.e. snacks) rather than the complete diet. For example, in the UK you can order individually tailored snack boxes direct to your letter box at graze.com.
A tailored food service relies on a strong relationship between the pet parent and the food company and employs direct ordering and home delivery in small packs that may even bear the pets own name and image. Tailored foods are a niche segment and pose a number of manufacturing and logistical challenges for scaling of businesses offering this service. It does however attract broad interest and raises the awareness of pet parents to the individual requirements of their pets. Pet parents want to be confident that they are feeding a suitable food and seek products that are designed for their pet’s needs, even if it this isn’t an individually tailored diet.
Retailer availability
The good news for pet parents is that a huge range of products and brands is available in supermarkets and specialist retailers. For example age (e.g. puppy, kitten, adult, and senior), lifestyle (e.g. neutered, indoor) and breed-size specific foods have been available for some time. Also breed-specific foods are increasingly available catering for pedigree pets. These products allow manufacturers to differentiate foods based on format, nutrition and function with associated marketing messages to attract owners to diets suitable for their pets.
Product differentiation
One of the key challenges for manufacturers in this segment is to differentiate their products from one another and standard foods. Theoretically this is simple but in practice it is harder to achieve commercially within production and logistical constraints. One way to achieve suitable product differentiation and remain commercially attractive is to use bespoke vitamin and mineral premixes and ingredient blends.
With clever premix portfolio design, flexibility can be achieved whilst limiting the number of raw material lines a manufacturer must stock. Working with a premixer that can provide bespoke premixes and blends in small batch sizes is also critical to ensure economic production whilst delivering the range of products that are demanded by discerning pet parents.