Pet food

Driving pet food palatant premiumization through biosolutions

Rebecca Replogle (moderator)

Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar today, Driving pet food palatant premiumization through biosolutions. I’m Rebecca Replogle, nutrition science lead here at Novonesis North America, and I’ll be your moderator today. Our speakers today will be Jimmy Rowe, who is the North America insights lead at Novonesis. Jimmy will be sharing a preview of a fresh study on consumer – i.e. pet parent – attitudes on pet food purchasing.

Jimmy excels at bringing together multiple signals from the market – from consumer, industry innovation and market trends – into insights that drive strategic growth for our customers.

Next will be Andrea Belford, a dynamic member of the food and health application science team here at Novonesis. Andrea brings a wealth of knowledge on the sensory and functional properties of food ingredients, and today she’ll share that experience with you on the application of enzymes for pet food palatability and product performance.

But before we dig in, let me briefly introduce you to Novonesis and our pet food toolbox. If you don’t know us, we are a biosolutions company offering primarily cultures and enzymes. This team are also proud pet parents, and some of our pets will make cameo appearances throughout this presentation.

We’re here to help the pet food industry in the areas of pet health with ingredients like probiotics. And our enzymes can help in multiple ways in pet food processing, including flavor development, as well as raw material efficiency and upcycling. But today we’re going to be focusing in on how biosolutions can help generate palatability.

So in this session, you will gain an understanding of pet food choices from pet parents and understand how enzymes fit into your pet food production processes, as well as the benefits of proteases in particular in palatant production. And we’ll touch on some additional uses of enzymes in pet food at the end. With that, I will turn it over to my colleague, Jimmy.

Jimmy Rowe

Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. That is my pet, Blue – affectionately named not because his eyes are blue, but actually because of the raptor Blue from Jurassic Park, as my kids loved at the time. Before we get into things, we were going to ask a little poll. I think after doing this survey, I realized that maybe I’m not the super high-end pet parent I thought I was. We’d like to hear where you think you fit in. What pet parent tier best fits you? If you could, just pop your answers in, and we’d love to see where everybody fits in.

All right. If everybody’s got their answers in, let’s close the poll out and take a look at the results. Wow. Well, the good news is most of you fit in about like me, more of a routine pet parent. We still got a good share, about 30%, fitting into the performance section and about 14% fitting in the upgrader. So almost a 50-50 split between higher-end pet parents, I would say, and us more routine parents.

So before we get into the data, let me just set the background a little on what we did from the pet survey perspective. We did a quantitative interview with about a thousand US pet owners – about 600 dog owners and about 405 cat owners. We focused primarily on ages 18 to 64. They had to be the primary chooser of the pet food for their household, and we tried to keep national representation based on gender, age and region.

The questionnaire took about 15 minutes and covered a variety of topics, like pet profiles and context, feeding behaviors and formats, shopping behavior, switching triggers, the drivers and benefits they’re seeking out, and emerging formats and trial barriers for some of those emerging formats.

So let’s dive into the data a little. To start off, if we look at the different types of pet food that most parents purchase, you can see there is quite a variety of types or formats that pet parents are purchasing. Dry and kibble still dominates for both dog and cat, but we are seeing a lot of wet and more natural fresh and raw products popping up, especially for dogs. We’re seeing fresh and raw pop a little higher.

And if we take a look at what’s happening, we’re seeing a lot of owners upgrading meals at home via toppers. We actually saw about 61% of pet owners saying they’re adding toppers to their pet’s main food to really help with palatability.

And when we asked them specifically what is driving topper usage, the majority said it was really focused on using toppers to improve taste and enjoyment. So when taste isn’t necessarily guaranteed for their pets, we see a lot of pet owners compensating with toppers as a way to bring a more enjoyable experience around their pet’s food.

We also saw other things, like adding toppers for additional benefits, increasing variety, and even trying to hide pet medicine. Those are additional ways we saw them using toppers, but it’s primarily focused around improving taste and enjoyment for their pets.

And really, when we take a look, palatability friction isn’t niche. We’re seeing many pets fall on the spectrum of being picky eaters.

We asked specifically, how picky is your pet about their food? And we saw about one in five of both cat and dog owners saying their pets were very picky, and another 20 to 25% saying their pets were moderately picky. So in total, about two in five pets fall on the spectrum of at least moderately picky eaters. So we’re really seeing palatability friction driving some changes in behavior and purchasing for consumers.

And it’s not only palatability. We’ve seen functional benefits really become table stakes for pet owners. About two in five pet owners report their pets having some sort of health condition.

And even beyond those with health conditions, we see about three in four dog and cat owners saying they’re already buying specialized or targeted nutrition products for their pets. So the implication is that benefit-led nutrition is now really part of what consumers expect – things like aging, immunity and joints. And you can see from one of the quotes we had here, when we asked, ‘Why did you switch foods recently?’

this was the response: ‘We wanted to get her something that gave her a daily intake of collagen for her joints.’ So we are seeing pet owners lean in a lot, and this is causing some switching behavior to focus on these health conditions and priorities from a nutrition standpoint.

And as I mentioned, we are seeing a lot of pet owners move foods because of palatability friction, or because they’re trying to get these health benefits or other performance nutrition metrics they want in their pet’s food. About four in 10 pet owners said they have switched pet foods in the last 12 months.

And about 41% of dog and cat owners say cost is a big barrier to switching foods. So not only do we see a lot of pet owners already switching, there is another barrier around cost – without it, even more pet owners would switch to a new food that may contain additional benefits or have better palatability for their pets, but cost may be stopping that decision from happening.

So what does this mean for brands and manufacturers? Well, in summary, we’re seeing owners really customize their meals. Owners are actively trying to improve acceptance at home through things like toppers. So brands that build palatability into the base food really reduce that friction and support repeat purchases. And as we talked about, functionality is becoming much more mainstream.

Benefits are really expected and not premium anymore. Products must deliver consistent performance, which increases the need for reliable ingredient functionality and repeatable processing.

And then finally, we saw a lot of switching behavior and price pressure. Frequent switching creates a constant win-or-lose moment for brands. So under budgetary pressure, manufacturers and brands need a strong sensory outcome and efficient, controllable production to help minimize cost where they can, so they can take advantage of the switching behavior that’s happening.

So that was a little taste of what we have from the consumer side. There’s a lot more behind this data that we’d be happy to share with you in the future. But now we’re going to switch over to the technical side and talk a little about how biosolutions can help improve palatability and process efficiency. And I’ll hand it over to Andrea.

Andrea Belford

Thanks, Jimmy. And before we get started with the technical program, I’d like to ask another poll question. Thank you for joining today – we’d really like to know why you signed up for our biosolutions webinar. So if we can start the poll.

Great. If we can close. I’m happy to see a variety here, but it looks like some of you are already working on improving your palatants. Hopefully we can give you some information today to show you how enzymes can do that, and also show you the value of enzymes.

And this is Dresden, whose pet parent is Rebecca, who started the program. He’s showing us how smart he is.

So let’s start with understanding proteases, because that’s the enzyme we are going to concentrate on today. Proteases act as molecular scissors, breaking peptide bonds to convert large, complex proteins into smaller, more soluble peptides and amino acids. And proteases are classified into two types. There are endoproteases, which break the internal peptide bonds of proteins, and there are exoproteases, which break the terminal peptide bond, releasing free amino acids.

When we’re looking at proteases, we should all understand that there are many choices out there. When it comes to endoproteases, there are different types. There are endoproteases that are site-specific in where they cleave peptide bonds, and there are endoproteases that are random. So you’ll potentially get different peptide lengths in your hydrolysis when using endoproteases. Another thing is understanding the power of combining endo- and exoproteases to give smaller peptides as well as free amino acids.

To check how your hydrolysis is going and understand the benefits of combining, you can see the chart on the right shows degree of hydrolysis. This is a measurement we test analytically to show how well our hydrolysis is going. It gives us the percentage of peptide bonds broken in our substrate solution.

Another thing to understand when working with enzymes is that all enzymes have universal factors – there is a sweet spot where enzymes work when it comes to pH, temperature and time, and also enzyme dosage. And depending on your process, there can be situational factors that may influence the activity of the enzyme. So with that in mind, let’s talk a little more about pet food processing. And this is my girl Iris – I’m the proud pet parent of her.

Before we jump into processing, let’s go through some pet food terms – basically, the difference between digest and palatant. Digest is a single source of protein, be it a meat or a plant protein, that has gone through hydrolysis. The digest is one component of the overall palatant. So we would take our meat digest and maybe add other components like sugars or yeast to promote Maillard reactions and more flavor. This is all part of what would go into your kibble production.

So let’s look a little closer at pet food production. As Jimmy mentioned in his survey, there are multiple ways we can use our palatants, whether it’s dry or wet, or even now treats and toppers. But for the sake of time, let’s just look at dry food production, step by step.

This is a very simplified version of the process, but I did want to highlight where enzymes are used. And I just want to give one shout-out to amylase, even though we’re not talking about it today. It is an important part of dry kibble production and the dough that goes through extrusion, and amylase enzymes can help your dough viscosity and throughput through the extruder.

But today I want to highlight palatant production. The palatant can go into multiple areas within dry kibble production. As you can see, you can liquefy and hydrolyze and it goes directly into extrusion, or you can apply it in the dry coating at 1 to 4% or higher, depending on your formulation.

The benefits of using proteases in dry food production are reduced viscosity, so you get better throughput through your extruder or when coating your kibble. It also increases nutrient density – I’ll show some data showing higher protein levels when you run your meat through protease hydrolysis. And finally, the important thing is that enzymes can increase palatability through the generation of free amino acids.

So let’s look a little closer at the viscosity I just talked about and how it benefits your process. The graph on the right shows the viscosity of the control versus chicken livers treated with multiple proteases. The treatments combine different times – anywhere from one to five hours – and different enzyme doses. And you can see that, regardless of time, you can reduce your viscosity up to six-fold.

Why is this important? Well, look at the picture on the left. You can see the chicken liver with no enzyme treatment versus the protease-treated chicken liver.

It’s poured through a screen, and you can see that with the protease-treated liver, there is no residual product left on the screen. That shows you can use the full, treated chicken liver in your process.

If you look at the no-enzyme sample, you can see there is wasted protein on top. You can’t see it very closely, but within the protein left on the screen there are larger chunks of meat fiber that would not be able to go through the screen and would be very difficult to process through extrusion or into the coating on your dry kibble.

Another thing I want to note quickly is that the protease-treated sample is a rich brown color. And if you smell it compared to the no-enzyme sample, it actually has some savory, brothy notes as well.

Another area where proteases benefit your digest is increased protein content. Additional protein is extracted, and it is in the soluble portion of your digest or palatant.

Enzyme dosage directly correlates to the amount of protein you can extract, as does time. In the studies we ran, hydrolysis was anywhere from one to five hours. And you can see that the longer you run your hydrolysis, the more protein you extract from your meat by-product – and the same with dosage. In this case it’s an endoprotease, and increasing the dose also increases protein extraction. Just for reference, the control protein is 4%, and after protease hydrolysis you can see it goes up to 8 or even 11% protein.

Another factor for proteases is increased free amino acids. You can see, once again, time is a factor in giving you more free amino acids. This also shows the benefit of combining endo- and exoproteases, which release two to three times more free amino acids across all the amino acids. In this chart, the first row is your control, which is very low in free amino acids, and as you move up in time, you can see the increase in free amino acids. I want to point out specifically that the first two columns are your umami-flavored amino acids, and you can get up to three times more of those free amino acids.

So what does this mean? Free amino acids have basic tastes that can help with palatability, but they can also generate more Maillard flavor reactions.

But we also understand that cats and dogs don’t taste exactly the same as we do. So you may say that certain sweet amino acids mean nothing to cats. But in the literature, we have seen that cats do respond to free amino acids.

And it’s important to notice that in this graph, the control chicken liver is the black bar, and you can see the amount of free amino acids. But when you do endo- and exoprotease hydrolysis in combination, you can increase the amount of free amino acids. It also shows that the free amino acids that are important to cats increase two to three times compared to the control.

So what does this mean? I’ve given you a lot of analytical data on hydrolysis and what it does to your proteins. But what does this really mean for the palatability of pet food?

We know that palatability is influenced by ingredients and processing. In the last slides, I’ve shown how proteases can improve the quality of your ingredient, as well as the factors that influence Maillard reaction products. It gives you more building blocks to create more flavor.

And the more we know about the components of our palatant, the more we can apply that to part three, the animal-specific factors. As we know, cats and dogs don’t taste the same, and if we understand the components of our palatant, we can better direct the creation of palatants our pets prefer. And the final factor is packaging. Understanding that the aroma of our palatants will be maintained during shelf life is very important as well.

Like I said, we’ve given you a lot of analytical data, but we also wanted to show you that we ran some pet food studies showing how our enzymes help increase food consumption. In this test, we are testing microbial proteases against papain. To understand the difference, papain is a plant-based protease.

At Novonesis, we provide microbial proteases. The benefit of microbial proteases is that our enzyme activity is more consistent and we provide shelf-stable products, whereas papain has some variability in its enzyme activity. So we can give you a more consistent product in your processing.

Let’s look a little closer at the exact results here. The papain was at a consistent level per kg across all four tests. Our microbial endoprotease was at a slightly lower level than the papain in the first column, at 0.5 g per kg, then at parity in the second column, and slight increases after that.

And we can show through our free amino acid data – this is the 0.5 g per kg of microbial endoprotease versus the papain – that the free amino acids are fairly similar. So the food consumption ratio is almost at parity, showing a slight advantage for the papain. But as you go up the dosages of the microbial endoprotease, you can see that the dogs definitely preferred the kibble made with the microbial endoprotease.

And the free amino acids increase each time we go up in dosage, which correlates to the preferences found in the kibble and the dog sensory results.

Additionally, we did another test to show how proteases can work across different animals and different animal proteins.

In this test, we did two different types of food: dry pet food and wet pet food. The first test was done with both cats and dogs, with dry pet food at 3% sprayed on the kibble. This compared papain again with the microbial combination of an endo- and exoprotease. And you can see from the consumption that the preference once again was for the microbial protease sample, for both cats and dogs. Dogs significantly, and cats moderately, preferred the sample with the microbial endo- and exoprotease.

The second test was done with wet food with a different protein – pork liver. The control was no enzyme, and the test was, once again, with the microbial endo- and exoprotease. And you can see the preference once again was for the sample made with the endo- and exoprotease.

One of the driving factors in how proteases work is giving you more protein and releasing more free amino acids to create Maillard reaction flavor compounds that drive preference in animals.

Before I close the technical section, I want to come back around to other areas we are looking into for enzyme and flavor development. We know that lipases work by releasing free fatty acids, and free fatty acids contribute to flavor. So this is ongoing testing we are looking at for future work in palatants.

And once again, I want to circle back to amylases. We do have data showing that they give process improvements to your kibble dough as it goes through the extruder. They can increase capacity by 20 to 30% and save 5 to 10% on extrusion costs.

So enzymes can drive palatability, but they can also drive cost reductions in your pet food processing.

Finally, to summarize, Novonesis can help you tailor your enzymes for flavor development through enzyme selection, timing and dosing specific to your source material.

We can also help you measure free amino acid levels in your samples and give you that feedback. And we’d be happy to work with you more on looking at free fatty acids as palatant preference drivers.

We’ve also shown that proteases improve ingredient functionality through additional protein and lower viscosity, leaving no protein waste behind – so you can use all of your protein source instead of having to reprocess it to get it through the system.

And once again, the advantages of microbial enzymes are consistent concentration and activity versus agriculturally produced plant enzymes, shelf-stable products, and predictable dosing, resulting in a more consistent product. So please contact us for any help selecting and using your enzymes.

And with that, I’ll turn it over to Rebecca.

Rebecca Replogle

Perfect. Thank you, Andrea and Jimmy. I have a couple of notes to wrap up, but if you have questions, please pop them into the chat and we’ll open the floor for Q&A after that. After these sections, we hope you have more familiarity with both our consumer insight capabilities and findings, and palatant generation using enzymes. We are more than happy to work with you to clarify any questions or explore projects together.

Again, in our toolbox as a whole, we concentrated today on palatant production, but we do have other solutions in the broader landscape as well.

As Jimmy mentioned, the study he shared today goes a lot deeper and has a lot more data to explore and mine together. So if your team is interested in hearing more about that consumer study, please contact us. It covers several areas of interest to the industry right now.

To do that, of course, you can reach out via email, but here’s a handy QR code. If you want to find out more about enzymes and pet food biosolutions or our consumer research, just scan it. Also, to let you know, we will be at Pet Food Forum in a couple of weeks in Kansas City. You can find us at booth 2427, as well as at a poster session and a tech talk. So give this a scan and let us know if you’d like to meet up with our team and discuss any projects you’re interested in.

So with that, I’ll open the floor to any questions that have come in. I’ll start with one for Jimmy.

Do you see toppers mainly as a picky-eater fix, or are they becoming a normal part of feeding routines?

Jimmy Rowe

Yeah. Based on most of the data we saw, it seems toppers are becoming more mainstream and not just focused on picky eaters.

We’re seeing them used for a variety of reasons, like I mentioned – not just palatability, but also adding functional aspects that may be important for pet parents, or giving variety.

So their pet has a little variety in what they’re eating, as well as using toppers for things like introducing medications. We’re seeing a lot of uptick in pet parents looking for functional attributes like joints, immunity and other things for their pets.

Rebecca Replogle

Yeah, absolutely. So really about customization as well. For Andrea: can we use molecular weight profile instead of degree of hydrolysis to determine enzyme action?

Andrea Belford

Yes, you could use molecular weight as well. It will show you the size of your peptides. So if you wanted to understand more about how many short peptide chains you have versus mid and long chains, it would be a way to look at hydrolysis as well.

Rebecca Replogle

Excellent. And then another technical question. I don’t know how straightforward this one will be to answer, but can we use proteases and lipases simultaneously in an aqueous medium?

Andrea Belford

Once again, it depends on your conditions and the enzymes we are using. If they’re all optimized at the same pH, time and temperature, then it’s possible to use the enzymes together. We need to understand your processing conditions and whether they match the enzyme activity optimization. But it is potentially possible to use them together.

Rebecca Replogle

It’s never quite straightforward, but we are here to work with you and collaborate.

Andrea Belford

Yes. I would love to have that project on hand to test it out.

Rebecca Replogle

We still have a few minutes. Back to Jimmy. You mentioned cost pressure and switching. What does price-constrained actually mean in practice? And how does that interact with things like clean label or other priorities?

Jimmy Rowe

In the context of the survey, when we say price constraint, we’re talking about the cost of the product keeping someone from buying the food they would prefer.

I think it was something like two in five dog and cat owners saying they would like to switch, but the cost of the products they would like to buy is prohibitive for them. There are a lot of factors involved there. Inflation has been fairly rampant over the past few years, so things are more expensive and consumers are finding places to limit their spending. And this is showing up here.

As it relates to clean label, we are seeing quite a lot of pet owners – I think the number was around one in three – saying they are already using clean label products for their pets.

So it’s interesting that that group was as high as it was. And obviously, with cleaner formulations and a lot of the new natural formats coming out, we’re seeing a lot of owners wanting to switch into those, but we are seeing some hesitancy around pricing for those clean label and more natural products.

Rebecca Replogle

Excellent. Thank you. And what you just rattled off speaks to the depth of that survey – there’s a lot of data behind it to share in the future.

Jimmy Rowe

Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Replogle

Another for Andrea. I know this is an area we’re actively exploring, and it probably needs a specific conversation, so please reach out on this one. But for wet pet food applications, do you have any data or recommendations on protein binding and texture with and without enzyme application?

Andrea Belford

Sorry, I was on mute. Do you have any data on protein binding and texture with and without enzymes? We don’t have a lot of data on how enzymes would influence texture at this point. It’s something we would have to look into, and it’s a good question, so I’m glad it was asked, but we don’t have data we can provide on that right now.

Rebecca Replogle

Yes, it is something we’re exploring, because in other industries this is an application for enzymes, but there are some boxes to tick before bringing it to pet food.

Andrea Belford

I can circle back on that. If you’re talking about transglutaminase, for example – an enzyme that can help bind – that is not AAFCO-approved for use right now. So it would be one we’d have to investigate.

Rebecca Replogle

Excellent. Oh, here’s another lipase question. It’s good to see that’s garnering some interest – I know we’re interested in exploring it further as well. When using lipase for lipid hydrolysis, how do you find the sweet spot for controlled hydrolysis without too many oxidized products?

Andrea Belford

Yeah, that’s interesting. I know that is a concern with free fatty acids in production with lipases. One thought is to reduce the temperature of the process to eliminate potential oxidation that way. So working with enzymes at a lower temperature might be a possibility for reducing oxidation.

Like Rebecca mentioned, these are definitely areas we’re working on.

Rebecca Replogle

Absolutely. So please reach out and connect with us, and set up a meeting. One final question from the consumer side that came in earlier: did you see any clear pattern in where people buy pet food? Are they mostly online, or still in stores?

Jimmy Rowe

Looking back at the data, it’s actually about a 50-50 split – about 50% primarily online and about 50% in store. I think the delivery model and the online presence we’ve seen for a lot of pet foods over the last few years has really moved the needle for more consumers buying online.

So if you’re a brand, you’ve got to be in both spaces and talk to consumers in different ways, depending on where they are making their purchases. But I think right now it’s about a 50-50 split, from what I remember.

Rebecca Replogle

Excellent. Thanks. So I think our last question – I don’t want to throw too much of a curveball here, Andrea – but have you ever compared enzymes derived from porcine pancreas?

Are microbial enzymes better than papain or enzymes derived from porcine pancreas? Some of the tissues used in pet food and palatant production contain endogenous enzymes, so I can see where that question’s coming from.

Andrea Belford

We’ve not compared against a porcine pancreas enzyme, so I can’t comment on that. As you saw from the data, we did compare against papain, and papain does hydrolyze the proteins. But the advantage, as I mentioned in the talk, is that microbial proteases have more consistent activity. Papain, because it’s plant-based, can vary in its activity, so you may not get as consistent a product with each hydrolysis.

The other point is that microbial enzymes are shelf-stable. There is some concern that papain is not as stable in terms of shelf life. And once again, there’s a steady supply with microbial enzymes because they’re produced through fermentation, whereas papain is an agricultural product, so there can be inconsistency in supply.

Rebecca Replogle

Perfect. Thanks so much. Well, with that, again, thank you for your attendance and thank you to my colleagues for sharing such great information. Hopefully we will see you in Kansas City at Pet Food Forum. Or again, please reach out with any questions or project proposals.