Would you feed your dog or cat an insect based food?

I can make a lot of changes to my own diet in order to improve my personal sustainability. Some of these, like reducing animal products are relatively straightforward. I just need to make sure that I meet my nutrition requirements and then cutting back on things like meat or dairy is pretty easy. But, I feel more constrained when it comes to my animals.

Navigating the sea of available dog and cat foods is difficult enough. Add sustainability into the discussion and I for one become paralyzed by having way too much to analyze. So let’s add one more possibility into the mix shall we: insect protein.

Now, I’m actually quite intrigued by insect protein options. It doesn’t alleviate the fact that many people eat too much protein. Too much of anything is not sustainable, no matter what the source. But how can insect proteins play a role in our diet, and more relevant to this post, a dog or cat’s balanced diet?

Fantechi and colleagues (2024) looked specifically at people’s perceptions of insect based pet food. The rationale being that people may be more willing to purchase insect based products for their pets than they are for themselves. This is still a huge market with lots of negativity impacts and sustainable potential. Further, unlike humans, dogs and cats can’t meet their dietary needs with a meat free diet, so finding alternatives is really important.

The researchers surveyed Italians with dogs or cats regarding their willingness to pay for different products. Pet food, advertised as containing insects was associated with a lower willingness to pay. In other words, people wanted to pay less for foods containing insects compared to conventional foods. On the other hand, people were willing to pay more for food marketed as healthy and sustainable. But this is where an interesting switch happened. If you marketed the food as healthy, sustainable, and insect based, customers were willing to pay the same for these products as conventional ones. True this doesn’t get a sales increase for companies but it shows that communicating the benefits of the food can compensate for people’s aversion to pet food containing insects.

What does all this mean? Insects, whether in people food or pet food is not popular with consumers who are unfamiliar with eating insects. But, there are strategies that can support increased uptake.

I, for one, would love it if pet foods in general were easier to assess. Adding insects into the mix doesn’t seem that tough, so long as I know it will be healthy. If it can also decrease things like emissions, sign me up.