Attractants in pet food

What is a pet food attractant

Food attractants are additives that improve the palatability of pet feed and increase pet appetite. Simply put, it is something that can increase your pet's appetite. Different animals have different tastes. For example, most cats and dogs like to eat meat, so it is necessary to eat food attractants with meat taste. Common food attractants on the market include pyrophosphate, sodium glutamate, meat flavors, flavorings, flavor additives, flavor enhancers, pet compound seasonings, animal hydrolyzed proteins, flavors, brewer's yeast, animal oils, and animal fats. liver.

The main raw material of bait

At present, the widely used preparation method of pet feed attractant is based on sea fish, animal liver, animal fat, yeast extract, etc. as main materials, minced raw materials, add appropriate amount of water for sterilization, and then add protease for enzymatic hydrolysis. After the reaction, amino acids and saccharides were added to carry out Maillard reaction, and the pet feed bait was prepared by spray drying.

Among them, the enzymatic hydrolysis method can degrade part of the protein into polypeptide substances that are easily absorbed by pets, and by controlling the Maillard reaction conditions, the bait attractants have a specific flavor, that is, the umami, fishy, and meaty tastes that cats and dogs like. The final bait-attractant product has a strong natural meat flavor.

Classification of pet food attractants

01 Natural food attractant

Strictly speaking, animal liver is also a kind of food attractant. If a cat food uses animal liver as a food attractant to increase the palatability of pets, does it mean that this cat food is not good? cannot! Because cats in the wild eat a whole prey, which includes meat, guts, bones, and fur. Cats are prone to malnutrition if they are only allowed to eat meat.

The top of the current feeding method - raw bone and meat feeding, also needs to add animal offal to supplement nutrition. Therefore, it is no problem to use animal offal as bait attractant in cat food. Animal offal is generally known as a natural attractant, as well as brewer's yeast. Yeast has a high concentration of glutamic acid, which will produce umami and meat flavor, and can promote the appetite of cats and dogs. Generally, only 1% is added to cat (dog) food.

02

unnatural food attractants

There are natural food attractants, of course, there are also non-natural food attractants, that is, synthetic food attractants, such as meat flavors, flavoring agents, flavor additives, taste enhancers, fragrances, etc. belong to synthetic food attractants. . This bait attractant is usually the amino acid after the protein is decomposed. If you apply it to any food, the cat will smell like delicious meat, so it will eat it.

In addition to the food attractants mentioned above, there are two special food attractants.

One is hydrolyzed protein, that is, hydrolyzed chicken, hydrolyzed duck. Hydrolyzed protein can produce a good food attracting effect, and it is one of the most popular food attractants currently used by merchants. Soy sauce used by humans is the earliest application of protein hydrolyzate to improve the palatability of human food.

The second is prebiotics. It is generally written as mannose oligosaccharide in cat food additives. Prebiotics have good food-attracting effects, as well as other beneficial effects on cats.

03

exploited bait

Adding a small amount of these bait attractants mentioned above has no effect on cats, but some unscrupulous merchants want to use shoddy food, use rice and wheat as cat food, and then add a large amount of synthetic food attractants, so that cats mistakenly think This grain is a lot of meat, and then I love to eat it. Eating this kind of cat food for a long time can easily cause malnutrition and picky eaters in cats, which is why some cat food is called poisonous food. Cats that eat these inferior cat food will generally have difficulty changing food. It is precisely because of these unscrupulous merchants that most shit shoveling officers hate food attractants.

But phagostimulants are not monstrous beasts, and talking about toxicity aside from the dose is a hooligan. A cat food with no food attractants, just like a dish fried without any seasonings that humans eat, most people don't like to eat it. In the same way, most cats do not like to eat cat food without any bait.

We shouldn't demonize bait, it's not wrong in itself, it's the people who use it, it's the raw material that's the truth regardless of marketing.