With demand growing for premium pet food, companies like Purina are looking for new ways to allow customers to give their pets the nutrients they need. For Purina, that means testing an unconventional, but potentially lucrative resource.
Bloomberg News on Tuesday, 29 January profiled the company’s pilot program to sell dog food featuring Asian carp. It’s a resource Purina can leverage while looking to take care of the environment and maintaining sustainability.
Asian carp is an invasive stock that has been rapidly expanding along the Mississippi River basin for more than four decades. Originally brought to the country to help contain algae blooms in private ponds, carp found their way into rivers thanks to flooding and have been a threat to native species and resources ever since.
In the past year, officials from Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin have sought ways to reduce the carp population and keep it from reaching the Great Lakes and other waterways.
Chris O’Neil, a senior brand manager for innovation at Purina, told SeafoodSource the company gets its carp from a family fishery in Illinois that receives the carp from local fishermen.
“As you can imagine, Purina has been researching alternative protein sources for some time,” O’Neil said. “We are exploring and evaluating different ingredients for use in our foods. Asian carp is one of the ingredients that we’ve tested and evaluated to ensure safety, quality and nutrition will meet our standards.”
Currently, Purina is selling the dog food under its RootLab brand in Chicago-area Pet Supplies Plus stores. O’Neil declined to release sales figures, but he added sales have been steady.
“We’ll look to expand into other markets in the future as opportunity arises,” he said.
RootLab isn’t Purina’s only venture that’s involved in using Asian carp as pet food. In November 2017, the company awarded a USD 10,000 (EUR 8,763) innovation grant to BareItAll Foods, a Chicago startup that uses the fish as its main protein source in its products for dogs and cats.
