New Whiskas flavours to woo humans
Mars-owned Pedigree Petfoods is reformulating its struggling flagship Whiskas catfood with the aim of making its petfood flavours appear tempting to human tastebuds.
Industry insiders say the cans of Supermeat, Fine Cuts and Select Cuts will appear later this year with updated flavours which will sound more appetising to shoppers, if not their cats.
The fashion for “tasty” petfood with human food values follows Spillers launch of its Purrfect range in cans about six months ago. The range features exotic flavours such as Beef in Rich Gravy Sauce, Salmon in Prawn Jelly and Rabbit in Game Sauce.
One source says: “Whiskas has to reformulate across all the 400g can range. It needs to upgrade its recipes in a can as the older ones become obsolete.
“The end-user of these products is not the buyer, of course. There are not many markets like this except baby food. A lot of pets are kept as substitute children and consumers want their ‘baby’ to have the best food.”
Marketing Week revealed that Pedigree was relaunching Whiskas after the brand lost its pole position in supermarkets to Spillers’ Felix (MW May 3).
Pedigree Petfoods was unavailable for comment.
According to a Euromonitor report released last month, owners are looking for analogues of their own diet when shopping for the family pet, and this is one factor boosting the market, worth about 1.6bn a year.
Asda is launching a special Christmas catfood under its Tiger sub-brand in turkey and smoked salmon flavours.
