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Sunny Kyungsun Moon

Senior Analyst, Food and Nutrition at Euromonitor International Korea

Sunny Moon is a Food & Nutrition analyst at Euromonitor International. She specialises in market research across a range of FMCG industries based on various experiences living in other Asian and Europe countries. Sunny focuses on consumer and industry trend with a keen interest in the impact of social and politics environment on consumer behaviour, especially food and eating patterns. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and graduated of Coventry University with Master of Business Administration.

 

Abstract

Pet industry is booming. Pet owners are willing to spend more on their pets and they consider them as family and friends – like a life companion. As pet owners continue to increasingly humanise their pets, owners have to more consider about pet health. In terms of pet health, what pet owners feed their pets can be the starting point for this. In this presentation, Euromonitor will introduce how to increase in the ratio of feeding pet food to dogs and cats, instead of leftover or treats by human. In this presentation, it will be referred to ‘pet food and fodder’ as ‘prepared food’, to distinguish it from leftover.

A stable growth of pet industry is directly linked to economy status. Premium pet culture has been developed, most of dogs and cats growing in Asian tier 1 cities consume premium prepared food regardless of its price. However, in Asia, the ratio of feeding prepared food to dogs and cats is still not so high. In South Korea, this ratio is still less than 50 percent, because many dogs living in rural area are still consume leftovers from their owners. Except for Japan and Singapore, notably developing countries record only 10-20 percent in the ratio of prepared food for dogs and cats. That means there are still lots of stray dogs and cats which don’t have any options to eat, even clean water in Asian backward region.

Lower ratio of feeding pet food to dogs and cats can cause imbalance of nutrition and they can be exposed to the disease. Korean people (called as Cat Mum) also feed leftover to stray cats with a warm heart, but it also makes cats be overweight and easy to be exposed to diseases as well. It was considered as one of issues in pet industry, economy brands of feed/fodder manufacturers have campaigned to make pet owners or people to feed prepared food regardless of product price for animal welfare and pet health in the long term. As a result, some brands of feed /fodder start to get interested in economy pet food, which helps to increase overall pet food market size for the historic period. In this speech, these cases in South Korea will be introduced.

On the other hand, as pet culture in tier 1 cities of Asian countries has rapidly developed, more pet owners would like to feed treats for wellbeing of their pets. Especially, the number of small dogs living in apartment is increasing under urbanisation among main cities of Asian countries, pet owners can’t help but control pet’s behaviour and noise as feeding more treats for the neighbours.

Also, some of pet owners prefer to make hand-made treats or food for their ‘fur babies’. Increasing in eating treats can interrupt taking minimum calorie intake and nutrition, it could cause obesity of pets and main reasons of being exposed to diseases. In South Korea, as there is a remarkable trend that pet owners humanise their pets, want their pets to live much longer and healthier with them. For this, feeding prepared food – animal/pet food – is getting more important.

In this speech, Euromonitor will introduce some campaign cases to increase pet owners’ awareness to feed pet food, not human food by manufactures, like a “please do not feed human food for your valuable dog and cat family” in Asia.