The pet food industry is the largest segment of the pet industry and is expected to be the first to benefit from the rise of the pet economy. On the one hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted booming demand for pets, driving up the number of pet owners; on the other hand, as China’s pet market entered a stage of rapid development, the early players who gained their dominance by mainly engaged in overseas OEM have begun to shift their business focus to building stronger self-created brands.
Countless companies are jumping into the pool of the booming pet economy. However, many of them just follow the trend without taking into account the actual market demand of the pet industry. Pet food safety, medical disputes, and trust crises occur from time to time. Taking pet food safety as an example, the black cat complaint platform, a third-party consumer service, shows that up to now, there are nearly 1,000 complaints associated with pet food deterioration, false advertisements, and so on.
Pet owners take the health of pets seriously and attach great special importance to the quality, nutrition, and safety of pet food. The challenge in the supervision of pet food and pet hospitals lies in the absence of standards. Liu Lang, chairman of the Pet Industry Branch of China Animal Husbandry Association, said that the key is to establish minimum requirements to protect consumer rights and interests, and it is necessary to set up relevant industry standards and promote market regulation and industrial standardization. The establishment of the National Companion Animal (Pet) Standardization Technical Committee and the Pet Feed Sub-Technical Committee of the National Feed Industry Standardization Committee will play a very important role in promoting the standardization of China’s pet industry.
It is reported that the MARA has announced a series of rules for pet feed management, such as “Pet Feed Management Measures” and “Pet Feed Production Enterprise Licensing Requirements”, to strengthen pet food management and regulate the pet food market.
The chaos in the pet food industry is only the tip of the iceberg since there are no unified laws and regulations, and industry standards for the pet economy in China. There is an absence of regulation in the pet economy, whether it’s upstream, midstream, or downstream. The long-term development of any industry can not live without institutional constraints. To take the opportunities offered by the fast-developing pet economy, industry players need to strengthen employee training, seek the guidance of industry associations and help of legal supervision to crack down on market chaos, protect consumers’ rights and interests, and achieve sustainable and healthy development of the pet economy.
