A veterinarian’s perspective on pet food trends

Gut feelings

Veterinarians often experience that clients have strong beliefs about the optimal diet for their pets. A lot of information on pet food can be found on the internet or is shared by social media. Unfortunately, this information is not always of good (scientific) quality. Pet owners tend to base their decisions on gut feelings and emotions, rather than on a rational, evidence-based approach.

Threat

Raw food diets have gained popularity, but they pose a possible threat to both pets and humans. 

The claimed health benefits of feeding raw food to pets are based on poorly documented cases and the opinions of, mostly, pet owners and breeders. As veterinarians have a task to safeguard animal health, they will not advocate a raw food diet for pets.

Human food trends

Some pet food trends stem from trends in human nutrition, such as grain-free, gluten-free, fermentable oligo-, di-, mono-saccharide and polyol-friendly (FODMAP-friendly) foods (i.e. foods that are low in short-chain carbohydrates which are poorly absorbed in the small intestine) and superfoods. 

Other pet food trends arise from their owners’ sustain-ability or ethical concerns, such as vegetarian diets for dogs and cats. As sales of such products increase, more and more pet food companies capitalise on these hypes or consumer concerns, despite the fact that such foods add very little to the health or well-being of pets. 

Despite all these trends it is interesting to see that most pet owners do not seem to pay much attention to the food they give to their pets, as low-cost pet food still accounts for the biggest market share, even in the world’s most wealthy countries.

Nutritional purposes

A small portion of owners feed their pets special food for particular nutritional purposes. Traditionally, these diets are aimed at tackling one specific disease by an altered nutrient composition. Because such diets are often not complete and balanced, they should be followed on prescription only and under a veterinarian’s supervision. 

As pets can suffer from multiple diseases, we are nowadays seeing a trend towards the development of combination diets. Some pet owners and veterinarians used to mix two different prescription diets to get the best of both worlds, but that is often ineffective as both diets can have opposing effects or one of the diets may dilute the effects of the other. With a novel composition that takes into account both diseases, these new combination diets ensure that the pet does indeed receive the best of both worlds. 

Tailor-made nutrition

As the demand for optimal diets for pets continues to increase among pet owners and veterinarians, more and more specific diets will be introduced on the market. This requires good collaboration between pet owners, veterinarians and pet food manufacturers. The ultimate goal is tailor-made nutrition, and this is already provided by veterinary nutritionists (e.g. home-cooked diets). 

Some pet food manufacturers have also started offering options for tailor-made diets to a certain extent. 

However, the production of these foods is labour intensive and costly, so the question is whether consumers are willing to spend more time and money on tailor-made diets.

What can the pet food industry do? 

Pet food manufacturers and retailers can help to improve the quality of the information available to pet owners, including:

by staying in contact with the veterinary profession and being approachable for  veterinarians. Manufacturers should make sure they have a nutritionist on board or in their network who can assist in answering questions.

by publishing white papers about the company’s products. What is the background and scientific evidence for the use of certain ingredients, or why is the product sustainable? This will preempt questions by helping veterinarians to find answers.

by setting up consumer panels to test new products with pet owners and ask for their feedback. This is a great way for companies to connect better with consumer demands.

Transparent

Information on packaging should ideally be more transparent and/or more extensive, but this is not always possible. In my opinion, it should be mandatory to put a statement that raw food products might contain harmful bacteria and should be handled with care. 

Both manufacturers and retailers have a responsibility to inform the public regarding risks that are associated with these foods, such as by sharing leaflets with hygiene instructions. See for example the Food and Drug Authority website: 

fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/ResourcesforYou/AnimalHealthLiteracy/ucm373757.htm#tips

When sharing a novel idea with the public, it is important to be transparent and make sure it is backed up by nutritionists and other stakeholders.