If pet owners are having a hard time finding their furry friends’ favorite foods, it’s not in their head, experts and pet store owners say: The pet food industry has not been spared from supply chain challenges affecting access to consumer goods across the U.S.
Pet store employees in Chicago said supply chain problems with pet food products during the COVID-19 pandemic have tended to be cyclical: A product might disappear for several months and then return, only for another product to disappear. Sometimes the issue is caused by problems with ingredients; other times it’s a shortage of packaging, staffing problems in factories or problems with transportation and shipping.
Rebecca Morgan, owner of the pet store A Paw Place in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, said she’d been having problems with stocking pet food more frequently now than earlier in the pandemic.
Morgan echoed other pet store employees who said they frequently have issues stocking particular items, but weren’t having problems keeping food on the shelves in general. “It’s happening more frequently,” Morgan said, “but I don’t think it’s happening with such a frequency that the whole industry is disrupted.”
“A lot of the time it’ll be one specific protein, because a lot of our food is protein-based,” said Shiloh Lane, assistant manager at the Bark by the Park pet store in Lakeview East. “So sometimes it’ll be duck, and we can’t get duck in, or any duck products in, for a really long time, or every now and then it’ll be salmon, and we can’t get salmon in for a really long time.”
Lane said Bark by the Park works with smaller brands rather than large pet food makers, and that those brands tend to be transparent when they’re facing issues with production.
With inflation at its highest since the early 1980s, pet food hasn’t been spared from the higher prices consumers are seeing across the board. Pet store owners said they needed to raise their prices to keep up with higher wholesale costs. Morgan and Lane both said they’d experienced distributors not just raising prices but also cutting quantities. One brand that used to sell pet food in 5- and 15-pound bags cut their product to 4 and 12 pounds while keeping the price the same, Lane said.
“Every single node in the supply chain has been disrupted over the last two years,” said Dana Brooks, president and CEO of the Pet Food Institute, a pet food lobbying group. Brooks said she sees national supply chain issues continuing through this year and potentially into 2023.
Beyond supply issues, Brooks said, demand for pet food has jumped during the pandemic due to the increase in pet adoptions. Online pet food retailer Chewy announced 24% growth in net sales for fiscal year 2021 compared with 2020, which in turn followed 47% growth in 2020 over the prior year. Meanwhile, Petco reported 18% growth in net sales in 2021 following 11% growth in 2020. Nestle, which owns Nestle Purina Petcare, the maker of cat food brand Fancy Feast, said in its 2021 annual report that pet food was a driver of its market share gains across the world.
Brooks isn’t concerned about the overall volume of pet food supply in the U.S. but acknowledged there may be fewer options on shelves than there once were.
For some individuals, a shortage of just one brand or product can be plenty disruptive.
Morgan said she has two customers whose cats only eat a particular kind of food that has been out of stock for about two months.
“My one customer knew that his food was having a problem and he bought up my entire stock, and then we weren’t able to reorder it after that,” Morgan said.
Faythe Lewis, a merchandise manager at a Petco location in the South Loop, said the store has fielded calls from people around the city trying to find their cat’s favored food.
Cats in particular can be picky eaters, said Kirsten Plomin, president of the Chicago Veterinary Medical Association. A cat that only ate dry food as a kitten may have a hard time switching to canned food and vice versa, she said.
Plomin said the prescription foods eaten by animals with specific medical needs have also been faced with supply chain challenges. In some cases, vets have needed to work with pet owners to shift their pet’s diet to another product.
Plomin recommends owners of pets with special dietary needs order their pet’s food much earlier than they otherwise would and to buy in bulk. They should reach out to their vet if they’re having trouble finding their animal’s food.
“There’s always something,” Plomin said. “It just may warrant you having a conversation with your veterinarian and then us pulling up multiple different suppliers to find which one is available where.”
At different times during the pandemic, Barbara Burdick, owner of Cuddle Bunny in Lakeview East, dealt with shortages both of the pellets used to feed baby rabbits and the hay that adult rabbits eat. Cuddle Bunny offers boarding service for bunnies, and people can also pay to visit with the organization’s live-in rabbits.
For the first year or so of their life, baby rabbits eat food that is higher in protein than the food for adult rabbits, Burdick said. For about two months last fall, a shortage of the pellets for baby rabbits meant Burdick had to swap their food for adult feed.
“You don’t want to switch up what they’re eating because their digestive systems are very sensitive and that can give them intestinal issues,” Burdick said. “But we had to do what we had to do, because they still had to eat.”
