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| PLEASE, no whipped egg soufflés. |
#Pet #Foods Go #Gourmet
By WILLIAM GRIMES NEW YORK TIMES
TONIGHT, thousands of Americans will sit down to a dinner of warmed-up leftovers or delivery pizza. Their dogs and cats, meanwhile, will feast like epicureans, beneficiaries of a foodie revolution that has transformed many kitchens into four-star restaurants for pets.
Cats who used to put up with plain tuna or mackerel can now savor white-tablecloth dishes like wild salmon and whipped egg soufflé with garden greens, part of Fancy Feast’s Elegant Medleys line, or Outback Grill, an Australian-themed entree from Weruva, with native fish like barramundi and trevally. Their canine cousins might be sniffing lustily as the pop-top opens on French Country Café, a beguiling mixture of duck, brown rice, carrots, Golden Delicious apples and peas offered by Merrick, a small family-owned company in Amarillo, Tex., or sending their taste buds to Hawaii with Kauai Luau, chicken with brown rice, sweet potato, prawns, egg, garlic and kale in a lobster consommé. The beach feast is one of the Tiki Dog flavors from Petropics, another small company. In most American homes, menus reflect belt-tightening. Mealtimes have lost some of their luster at the high table. Down on the kitchen floor, however, the picture is rosy. “It is now considered socially acceptable to treat pets as members of the family and to express that by spending lavishly on them, especially when it comes to food,” said David Lummis, the senior pet-industry analyst for Packaged Facts, a market research company. COMMENT: A REASON WHY OUR CIVILIZATION IS BECOMING LIKE ROME IN 400 A. D. Joe Davison, a financial adviser in San Francisco who shops at Catnip & Bones on Chestnut Street, gave his two black Labradors a culinary upgrade about four years ago. They now dine on Cowboy Cookout and Grammy’s Pot Pie, two of the retro American flavors sold by Merrick. “The dogs love it, and I believe it helps with their health and coat, but I admit that it’s partly based on what looks good to me, Mr. Davison said. “You can see green peas and pieces of potato along with the chunks of meat. It’s amazingly like real people food.” COMMENT: NOT THAT HE’D EVER EAT DOG FOOD. The new generation of chef-inspired pet foods accounts for no more than 5 percent of the pet-food market, but the market is big. Retail sales of dog and cat food exceeded $19 billion in 2011, according to the market research company Euromonitor International. Also, profit margins in what is sometimes called the super-premium category, a fuzzily defined niche that embraces natural, organic and gourmet pet foods, can reach 40 percent, compared with 30 percent for premium brands and 20 percent for standard brands. Pet owners, invariably called “pet parents” by the makers of super-premium pet foods, do not mind reaching in their wallets and paying extra, even in recessionary times. Two underlying forces have intensified the urge to spend: aging pets and a growing population of affluent pet owners spending money on them. The American Pet Products Association, an industry group, found in its most recent pet-owner study that about 4 in 10 American households own a cat and almost half own a dog. Increasingly, these pets are middle-aged or elderly. The most recent edition of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s “U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook,” published in 2007, reported that about 4 in 10 of those cats and dogs were older than 6. At the same time, Packaged Facts has reported, households with incomes of more than $70,000 accounted for nearly half of total spending on pet food in 2010, up from less than a third in 2000. A new study of the pet industry by Dillon Media reports that those making more than $100,000 a year increased their share of pet-food spending and now account for about a third of the total market. These are precisely the health-conscious, label-scrutinizing, restaurant-going consumers likely to indulge their cats and dogs at mealtimes.
“Anybody who does not know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.” Franklin P Jones
