Cats – a growth market

An adult cat of average size and weighing around four kilograms eats up to 70 grams of dry food and approximately 250 grams of moist food a day on average. If we extrapolate these figures for Europe as a whole, we arrive at 8.89 tonnes of dry food per day or 3 245 tonnes per year. In the moist food segment, the corresponding totals are 31.75 tonnes per day or 11 589 tonnes per year. Anyone can work out for themselves what these figures mean for retail sales.

Even before the pouch, tray or can is passed over the counter, however, an entire chain of producers, suppliers and manufacturers exists. The European industry association Fediaf estimates that pet food companies in Europe employ around 180 000 people and that another 840 000 work indirectly for the pet sector.

A significant factor responsible for growth is the acceptance of cats as pets. Surveys have long since indicated that purring felines are cherished and cared for, pampered and given gifts more than ever in households. This is increasingly clear also due to the substantial growth of the market in the treat category.  

Added to this is the fact that even cats in rural areas, which live outdoors in stables and on farms, are being fed on industrially produced convenience food to a growing extent. Whereas previously cats were left to their own devices, so that they had to feed themselves on mice they had hunted or on livestock feed, the buzzword now is acceptance.

Anyone who has followed the pet sector in recent decades can easily see that year on year, much more industrially produced food has been fed in relation to the number of pets, making it a clear replacement for leftovers or the pursuit of mice. In the countries of Eastern Europe in particular, there has been an increasing need to catch up in recent years. The arrival of organised pet store chains according to the Western European model in large numbers will have contributed to this phenomenon.

Scarcely any product range in the international pet supplies sector relies as much on innovations as that of the cat segment. The focus is on healthy, high-quality treats using protein sources ideally obtained from ecological animal husbandry or free-range farming. This is based on entirely human reasoning, because treats are a particularly good way of strengthening…