New Pet Food Product Development Perseveres in Pandemic
2020-06-10 09:33:17
Although the COVID-19 pandemic slowed many aspects of the global economy while taking hundreds of thousands of lives, the pet food industry found ways to adapt. New products continued under development in dog, cat and other pet food facilities worldwide. Likewise, pet food ingredient, equipment, packaging and other suppliers adapted to digital technologies in place of traditional business practices.
Technology facilitating pet food perseverance in pandemic
Pet food industry suppliers increased their use of electronic communications technologies as the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly halted traditional forms of business. Dog, cat and other pet food industry business eschewed personal meetings and trade shows. Instead, they moved towards virtual events and webinars.
Paul Manning, president and CEO of Sensient Technologies, said (see video below) his company has tried different ways of interacting with our customers obviously since we couldn’t conduct business as usual with face-to-face visits.
“We recently embarked on a very extensive set of webinars,” he said. “We do webinars on different technologies and innovations… We’ve done more and more webinars on the supply chain and what are these challenges that we as an organization are seeing, so we could share those insights with our customers.
“We’ve done a lot of educational work on consumer behavior,” he said. “What are some of the trends we’re seeing? That kind of information is very interesting to some of our customers who may not operate on a global level, or if they do, they can compare their experience to ours to create a more predictive model.”
New pet food product development continues during pandemic
The next phase will be the trends coming out of the COVID-19 crisis, he said. Pet food industry professionals want to know how dog and cat owners may change their behaviors, and what kind of products they will want.
The pandemic hasn’t stopped new product development, he said. Sensient’s customers still request samples and carry on with testing.
“They’re perhaps not as active as before this crisis, but there’s still a strong interest,” Manning said.
Many customers around the world plan to launch products in this crisis or very quickly after, he said.
Watch the interview and read the full article at the link below.
