Could pet food ingredient suppliers market their products just as Intel, Splenda, NutraSweet or ZEISS lenses do? Those brands advertise the components of a final product directly to consumers. Ingredient supplier branding aims to build preferences among end buyers. Intel and the other companies’ marketing teams aim to make manufacturers believe that incorporating these components will enhance the products’ appeal to consumers, researchers wrote in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing.
“Our new brand that we rolled out earlier this year is Hilucia,” Sean Madison, director of North American business development at Innovafeed, told Petfood Industry. “It’s a portmanteau, a shortening of Hermetia illucens, the scientific name of the black soldier fly. As a supplier to the pet food industry, we have thought about ways to break through to consumers. We don’t have direct relationships with consumers, but our brand partners do. We leveraged our new brand in a branding strategy with our innovative customers, and the “Powered by Hilucia” label was born.”
Innovafeed’s first two partners to feature the Hilucia label are Jiminy’s and Arch Pet Food. Their new packaging will feature a Powered by Hilucia Protein or Powered by Hilucia Protein and Oil label on the front. On the back or side, labeling will explain what Hilucia means.
Consumer researchers have observed that pet owners may find even the insect’s name off-putting, he said. Likewise, the biological aspects of the insects may not be the most approachable way of talking about BSFL protein and oil as a nutritious, sustainable ingredient in pet food.
“The Hilucia label is a solution to a lot of those things,” he said.
Benefits of advertising pet food ingredients to consumers
Developing positive relationships directly with consumers could benefit pet food ingredient suppliers. During the melamine recalls of 2007, hundreds of dogs and cats began dying after mysterious crystals blocked their kidneys. The stricken pets had all eaten pet food adulterated with melamine and cyanuric acid by a China-based ingredient supplier. The repercussions of that event continue as some customers still avoid pet foods made with ingredients from China. Numerous pet food companies market their products as not containing ingredients from China, which some have called Sinophobic. Another approach might be for a pet food ingredient company to market themselves to consumers as a dependable source of tested raw materials. Seeing a logo for that brand on a bag could reassure consumers through positive marketing claims, without the risk of alienating one and half billion people or so. Meat renderers could follow a similar track, considering the pentobarbital recalls of a few years ago.
Even before the melamine recalls, dog, cat and other pet owners had begun using the internet to research brands. In the intervening decade and a half, pet owners went online at ever-increasing rates to find more information about their pets’ food and what goes into it. Pet food and treat brands adapted to this and began offering more detailed information online about nutrition and health aspects of their products. Likewise, consumers want to know about pet food’s provenance from a social and ecological standpoint. After reports of slave labor in the pet food supply chain, consumers increased their scrutiny of brands’ human rights records. Consumers’ growing sense of responsibility for how their purchases affect others has also boosted environmental awareness. The effects of climate change, habitat destruction and resource depletion will increasingly affect people’s lives and fuel concerns about maintaining our current living standards in the future. Pet food brands themselves have taken on the sustainability cause, perhaps more than other industries since pet owners tend to be sympathetic to wild animals and livestock due to loving their own dogs, cats, snakes, pigs and other pets. A pet food ingredient supplier could latch on to these consumer demands, but only if the company had truly adopted practices that reduce resource use, pollution and other pressures on the ecosystems that all people depend on for food, water, medicine and other products.
No home PC owner uses an Intel chip by itself, but the company advertises their product to personal computer buyers. On the other hand, AMD makes fine processors too, but the average home computer buyer won’t recognize that brand, nor does its name immediately bring to mind a slogan like “Intel Inside.” While hardcore gamers debate the merits of the two chips, Intel has an advantage with the less techy public. Most folks don’t understand (or particularly care about) the single-threaded performance ratio of a particular chip. They just want to play a game or stream a high-def movie without the machine bogging down. Likewise, pet owners don’t know about amino acid ratios in novel protein sources. They want to know that their pets’ foods are safe, nutritious and ethical. Pet food ingredient suppliers could help provide that assurance by making consumers aware of their product, developing a brands’ reputation and increasing transparency.
Having a positive reputation with pet owners could help damage control when rare events like this occur to ingredient suppliers. People tend to perceive the mistake of a trusted source as a one-off error, whereas people may interpret an unknown company’s errors negatively. Pet food and treat brands work to develop and maintain positive relationships directly with pet owners through social media, websites and other means. By branding their ingredients to consumers, a supplier does something similar. Pet owners may start to look for ingredients from certain suppliers as they look for made-in-USA labels.