OVERVIEW As pet owners increasingly seek tailored nutrition for their animals, understanding how life stages influence eating behavior becomes crucial. This work explores the link between two key palatability metrics, first choice and intake ratio, where in AFB palatability results it becomes clear that flavor preferences in pets evolve throughout...
What is the best pet food palatant?
Choosing the best palatant for a customer is a complex process that demands a deep understanding of the customer’s needs.
What is best?
Send me your best palatant to test.’ This is a request that the R&D Department of AFB Europe gets often, and it is not a simple request to fulfil. That is because there is no universal ‘best palatant’. Consider the example of selecting a dessert in a restaurant. Would you say ‘bring me your best dessert’ if you know you love chocolate but are allergic to nuts? The server needs to know something about your taste preferences and dietary restrictions to select the best dessert for you.
To serve a customer optimally, it is essential to get the best information available. With that information in hand, it is possible to perform a careful analysis to recommend options that will work synergistically with the desired product, leading to high-performing results.
The palatant in play
Different flavour profiles can yield the same excellent palatability performance. To determine the best approach, it is necessary to understand the interaction of the palatant with other factors that may affect palatability. Crucial to performance are factors like product formulation, ingredient quality and process capabilities. It is also important to recognise the customer’s performance parameters and definition of ‘best’. This could include beating a current product, meeting a competitive benchmark, or winning against a new off-the-shelf brand.
Also, if a palatant is for a product that must meet a specific market position, cost structure, benchmark, label, regulatory constraint or ingredient claim (grainfree, natural, etc.), this will impact the palatant decision, too. The more pieces of the puzzle that are available, the easier it is to select a palatant designed not only to deliver excellent performance, but also to work within a customer’s matrix of parameters.
More than one best
There also may be more than one ‘best’ palatant for a customer. In reality, there may be multiple options to achieve the customer’s performance objectives. If one option is not preferable for application or formulation reasons, or if more than one option is needed to distinguish diets, multiple palatability solutions are available.
By clearly understanding a customers’ complex needs and providing more than one ‘best’ palatability solution, AFB lays a firm foundation for success.
PETS International | October 2020