Dog food marketers make owners slobber over coconut, quinoa
Pet food trends are following their owners’ tastes with some brands marketing plants, the very ingredients they once sidelined, but they’re not the plants the industry has historically relied on, such as high-protein soybean and corn-gluten meals.
Instead, Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd. offers a Chicken & Quinoa Ancient Grains recipe, for example, and a grainfree line from Nestle Purina Petcare Co.’s Beneful is now “accented with blueberries, pumpkin & spinach.” Honest Kitchen Inc., which uses only human-grade ingredients, has been selling its Chicken & Quinoa recipe since 2006 and now offers Beef & Chickpea, Duck & Sweet Potato, and Fish & Coconut blends as well.
Dogs aren’t wolves, after all. They’re omnivores, said Anna-Kate Shoveller, an assistant professor of animal biosciences at the University of Guelph, in Canada, home of the Ontario Veterinary College. “They do quite well on a vegetable-based or a lower-protein diet,” she said.
Shoveller researches nutrition in animals and has been conducting experiments and publishing on a newly controversial topic: feeding vegetables to domestic dogs. And despite recent documentaries and marketing trends, Labrador retrievers, cocker spaniels, and the rest of the nearly 70 million dogs living in homes in the U.S. do not need to be fed like wild beasts.
Consider the nearly $30 billion pet food market’s second- and third-mostpopular dog food brands: the relative newcomer Blue Buffalo, whose “farm-to-table inspired canine cuisine” features a portrait of a wolf on each bag of its Wilderness line, and Beneful, whose bags brag of “real” chicken, beef and salmon as “the #1 ingredient.” Together, the two brands sold more than $2.3 billion of dog chow last year. (Pedigree, Mars Inc.’s budget-friendly brand, was the top-selling dog food in the country in 2016, pulling in $1.6 billion, according to data from Euromonitor.)
Blue Buffalo has played the healthy-wolf card better than any other company, despite admitting in a lawsuit that its ingredients weren’t always as marketed. Founded in 2002, it commanded 7.5 percent of the U.S. dog food market last year, making it the fifth-largest seller in the country. That’s still small compared to No. 1 Nestle Purina’s 23.5 percent, which is down from 26.8 percent
in 2011, according to Euromonitor.
If there’s a mythos around meat, plants come with their own presumptions. The industry’s pivot back to plants, if only certain ones, seems a bit silly to experts, at least from a nutritional point of view.
“If soy is bad, why is pea good?” said Ryan Yamka. Yamka is an animal nutritionist certified by the American College of Animal Sciences, as well as founder and independent consultant with Luna Science and Nutrition. “It all comes down to marketing,” he said.
Pet food in the U.S. falls under a mix of federal and state regulations.
Owners looking for assurance
that a food meets their pets’ nutritional needs should look for the “Complete and Balanced” nutritional adequacy statement on the package.
The statement is based on nutrient profiles for dog or cat food set by the Association of American Feed Control Officials and guarantees that the food is nutritionally balanced.
The association has no
enforcement power of its own, but most commercially available pet foods sold comply with its profiles, no matter what ingredients are in them.
“Pets don’t need ingredients, they need nutrients,” said Mary Emma Young, the communications director at the Pet Food Institute, the industry’s trade group, repeating a popular refrain in the pet food world.