Freshly made and then flash frozen, Wednesday’s meal now arrives in freezer bags and insulated packaging. Barkham now sets aside £150 ($190) a month for his direct-debit delivery of meals and treats on Wednesdays, with food alone costing around £90 ($114) over four week. It’s a significant price hike, but Barkham says making room in the budget for a high-end meal that meets all of Wednesday’s — and his own — needs is worth it, even with including, “some small sacrifices such as fewer takeaways per month”. The biggest, he says, is that, “because we live in a small flat with a small freezer, we now only get one drawer for human food”.
Many dog and cat owners have seen ads from brands around the world – Perfect Bowl, Smalls, The Farmer’s Dog, Elmut and more – touting healthy pet food that may not look like much. their own plates. More and more, owners are ordering these products, mostly from subscription-based ecommerce startups, and giving into the visceral urge to give their beloved pets the most -useful and healthy food they can afford – even if it’s more than financial logic.
From table scraps to pet chefs
The American Pet Products Association estimates that Americans will spend $58.1bn (£46bn) on pet food and treats in 2022, and UK Pet Food estimates spending in the UK in 2023 at £3.8bn ($4.8bn). But the remarkable size of the modern pet food industry – and its premium level – is relatively new.
“For most of the 20th Century, domestic animals were fed kitchen scraps, such as leftover meat and bones because these foods were cheap and more readily available,” says Natalia Ciecierska-Holmes, a PhD researcher who studies alternative diets for dogs and humans at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the University of Nottingham, UK.
Canned horse meat was a popular food for dogs in the 1920s, he explained, and commercial pet food companies were not established until the 1950s, selling dry kibble derived from -extruding dry and wet ingredients into a shelf-stable product.
Ciecierska-Holmes points to a defining moment in the shift toward alternative pet foods: a 2007 global recall of commercial pet food. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found wheat gluten contaminated with melamine and cyanuric acid, entered the supply, which led to the death of 14 cats and one dog. “These recalls increase distrust in the commercial pet food system [and spawned] a desire for greater control over where these ingredients come from,” he said.
