Often described as a fast-follow industry, pet supplements are quick to mimic trends in the human supplement space, and this extends to shopping behaviors. Nicole Hill, executive director of strategy at Marketplace, reports that 90% of dog parents purchase their animal companion’s supplements online.
What are they buying?
According to Hill, the trends show that consumers look for natural, organic and non-GMO labeling on pet supplement products and understand the difference between these categories. Organic remains the most compelling of categories for these purchasers, as consumers find organic “twice as compelling” when making purchases for pets as compared to non-GMO, Hill said.
There were 36 ingredients that Marketplace found trending this year, including niche ingredients ranging from fermented yeast to spirulina and marine algae. Awareness of prebiotics continues to grow, although somewhat slower than consumer understanding of probiotics.
“You don’t necessarily have to say gut health for consumers to associate biotics with that, although having that reinforced, whether it’s on packaging, in your sales materials and your advertising, helps make the connection and in the space as well,” Hill said.
She noted white space in the novel protein sector.
“That’s where there’s an opportunity for the pet category to maybe be ahead of the human space, because people are more likely to offer those types of proteins to their dogs,” she added.
Investing in pet health may still be the norm, but the number of people bringing home a pet has declined post Covid, said Lauren DeVestern, managing director and partner at LEK Consultants. Although the average number of pets for households has ticked up a bit, she said, “I think the years of 1% to 2% consistent year-over-year growth are behind us for a bit. We have pretty high household penetration of pets already.”
The China market
The household penetration of pets is growing in China. Nicole Lin, business development country manager at Tmall Global (China’s leading import e-commerce platform by the Alibaba Group) said cats make up most of the pet ownership market, followed by dogs. Her company is seeing an increasing opportunity to import pet health products from the United States and other countries.
However, foreign importers need to understand the consumer payment climate in China, where many people use resources such as Alipay, one of the biggest digital wallets in that country. When foreign companies learn to use these platforms, they will capture significant market share in China, including pet supplement companies, Lin said.
“Have a digital strategy first to build your brand awareness before you know you can become a supplier, and this applies to all official stores,” she added.
Launching a store on Alibaba via Tmall can be lucrative for companies. One German firm which launched on the platform in 2022 has become one of the five top pet supplement companies in China. Lin highlighted the German company’s unique selling points, including its simple assortment of products. The company, which has sold 65,000 products in China, also conducts a daily live stream so that customers can engage with the brand.
HMB research
The NASC conference held five science and compliance sessions, including a talk by Shawn Baier, vice president of innovative products at TSI Group about the implications of beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate (HMB) on dogs. In his session “Unlocking the Potential of HMB for Canine Muscle Mass Retention and Weight Management”, he presented findings showing that as activity level decline in dogs, there is a significant loss of muscle mass.
“We see a decrease in protein synthesis as they age, and we see an increase in protein breakdown, and then you couple that with the inactivity, you get this accelerated loss,” he said. “There’s a significant deviation when you get to about 10 years of age to 12 years of age for a canine. You see an accelerated quality of life issue for many dogs.”
For some dogs, conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) appear with age. Baier presented findings from a study published earlier this year in Scientific Reports which showed that oral HMB treatment helped to build and maintain muscle protein and function. The dogs studied were able to achieve metabolic improvement.
This kind of research holds promise for different brands currently carrying HMB, Baier said.
“We really want partnerships and groups that are going to utilize HMB the correct way,” he added. “When we look at things like mobility and the success of those products in the market, joint health is only one part of the equation. The other part of the ability that’s incredibly important is muscle mass, muscle health, muscle function. And if we put both those two things together, the outcomes are tremendous.”
FDA inspection slowdown?
The legal and legislative update for the pet supplement industry included a discussion on federal workforce changes.
Todd Harrison, partner at Venable, and Ivan Wasserman, managing partner at Amin Wasserman Gurnani, agreed that the supplement industry was already experiencing the top-down changes directed by the Trump administration.
Wasserman suggested that in this current political climate with a reduced federal workforce, there is less ‘activity’ at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and that it seems logical to think that there will be less enforcement against claims being made and fewer inspections of animal supplement manufacturers.
“But we haven’t seen a slowdown in inspections,” he said. “It may be that [the FDA] is sort of figuring out exactly what they’re going to do.”
The FDA is considering outsourcing inspections to states, which could either increase or decrease the frequency of facility inspections, he added.
“If that happens, it will possibly create a little bit of confusion if each state doesn’t inspect the same way and follow the same rules for animal supplements,” Wasserman said.
Harrison noted that the pet industry may not be under as much scrutiny as the human supplement industry during the Trump administration, which he said, “probably has had more enforcement than maybe the animal industry” because the current secretary of HHS is focused on ingredients in the human sector.
Bill Bookout, NASC president, said it was important to “keep tabs on FDA’s thought processes” by, for example, spending time searching online for the contents of warning letters by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Along with policy changes, macroeconomic forces such as tariffs may also influence the pet category. Lauren DeVestern of LEK Consultants said that although the economy may be a challenge to predict, her firm was “projecting still very strong growth in the pet category” post tariffs.
“If you just look at the percent of pets taking some sort of pet wellness or pet supplement product, it’s still pretty low,” she added. “It’s about 30%. Compare that to 80% of humans taking supplements. We’ve just got this huge runway left…so it’s very easy to still be bullish despite macroeconomic conditions.”
