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Lin Lin's side job is being a pet blogger. In the past six months, over 40% of the advertising invitations she received on Xiaohongshu's Dandelion platform were from fresh pet food clients. In her experience, this type of pet food seems to be becoming a trend. Especially at the beginning of this year, Hou Yi, who announced his return to entrepreneurship with great fanfare, launched a new retail brand, "Pet Fresh Fresh" (Pai Te Xian Sheng), with stores primarily serving pets, where fresh food is the main pet food category. The hot startup once pushed "fresh pet food" into the spotlight.
Behind the heat, new issues related to fresh pet food have emerged.
Lin Lin noticed that among the fresh food brands that approached her, few could provide professionally shot studio photos or promotional video materials. Every time she posted an advertisement video for fresh food, the comment section would attract comments from bloggers who make homemade fresh pet food, "They're all just trying to drive traffic; I delete them all."
Compared to the European and American markets, where the fresh pet food category developed earlier, China's fresh food market is still in its early stages.
This emerging category faces many problems—what is driving the popularity of these new products? What exactly is "fresh pet food"? What kind of supply chain is upstream? How is the supply side of this pet food changing? In this article, we attempt to clarify these issues.
Fresh Pet Food with a "Fresh" Label
The emerging pet-owning consumer group in China is the soil for the growth of the fresh food category.
Xiao An is the "parent" of an elderly Teddy dog. About 10 years ago, she began to pay attention to and learn about pet feeding knowledge. In 2016, she first purchased fresh pet food from a Taobao store recommended by a Weibo KOL. At that time, there were few merchants offering similar fresh food; most were small family workshops without factories, brands, or even cold-chain delivery.
In the past two years, Xiao An has clearly felt that pet food is changing—products are becoming more diverse and moving toward freshness.
We noticed that this freshness trend is not only reflected in the emerging fresh food category but also in the optimization of traditional categories.
On one hand, the popularity of the fresh food category continues to rise. Not only have factory-produced, brand-operated fresh food companies emerged, but platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin have begun to see a large amount of content promoting related products.
On the retail side, pet-specific sections are becoming more segmented, and new retail brands like "Pet Fresh Fresh" that focus on the fresh pet food category have emerged. In May, the brand announced the completion of an angel round of financing of approximately 180 million RMB. "Pet Fresh Fresh" was also jokingly called "dog malatang" by netizens because its stores offer self-selected ingredients that can be processed on-site and have a certain social aspect, which expanded the brand's visibility and attracted more foot traffic.
In addition, some players in the traditional food industry chain have crossed over into the fresh pet food field, trying to leverage their supply chain foundations to find growth in the pet food sector, which still has room for expansion.
A few months ago, Babi, which specializes in making buns, announced the establishment of a new company, "Beiyafu." The new company plans to develop fresh pet foods such as buns and shaomai, based on Babi's years of experience in raw material procurement, food processing, product development, and supply chain management. Currently, Beiyafu is also a supplier to Pet Fresh Fresh.
On the other hand, major brands focusing on traditional pet food are increasingly emphasizing the "fresh" characteristics of their products.
Although these traditional brands may not necessarily develop dedicated fresh food product lines, they have made the "freshness" of raw materials a key selling point in new or key product lines.
For example, Zhongchong's sub-brand "Wanpy" launched wet canned food and baked kibble in 2024 that emphasize the use of real fresh meat instead of meat meal; Xianlang, although its main products are baked kibble, its biggest marketing point is the full traceability of its meat sources from farming to processing, as well as fresh slaughter and processing.
Furthermore, some wet food or canned products produced through traditional processes have even appeared on the market, sold under the guise of "fresh food."
The pursuit of "freshness" is essentially the supply side catering to the potential anxiety of new pet owners—when pets are regarded as family members, the concerns about ingredient freshness, safety, and clean labels that people have in their own daily diets are naturally transferred to their thinking when choosing pet food. Compared to long-shelf-life, commercially sterile foods on the market, fresh food processing methods can retain some nutrients.
But faced with the dazzling array of fresh food options on the market, Xiao An finds it even harder to choose. Pets can't speak, so owners can only judge by bowel movements, general condition, and physical examination indicators.
Every time she buys pet food from a new brand, Xiao An searches Xiaohongshu for reviews, but the results are confusing because the platform shows an equal number of positive and negative reviews. Now, when she switches pet food brands, she relies more on recommendations from friends.
For newly emerging fresh food products, Xiao An is more cautious—do product pages that advertise fresh raw materials qualify as fresh pet food? Is fresh food with a claimed scientific formula really suitable for her dog? These are all concerns when choosing new products.
A few years ago, Xiao An bought the Japanese author's book "Cooking with Your Dog." Now, she follows the author's methods and cooks for her pet at home.
A New Category with Unclear Definitions and Missing Standards
Xiao An's concerns when purchasing fresh food also reflect some of the problems currently existing in this category—vague definitions, unclear standards, and regulatory gaps.
Liu Ce, deputy director of the Pet Innovation Research Institute of the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, believes that the commercialization of fresh pet food is essentially an extension of homemade pet food and a diversified supplement to pet food.
But as homemade food is transformed into industrialized products, it faces the core problem of lacking definitions and processing standards in China.
Referring to the popular definition of fresh food in the US market, where the category has developed for a longer time, Liu Ce summarizes fresh pet food as products that are not sterilized at high temperatures and pressures of 121°C or above, but are cooked using low-temperature steaming or pasteurization, have a short shelf life, and require low-temperature storage and cold-chain transportation.
If this processing standard is applied, many products currently circulating in the domestic market that are labeled as fresh food—such as wet food and canned food—actually still belong to traditional pet food and do not count as fresh food.
"The freshness of raw materials cannot represent the freshness of the food." Liu Ce emphasized.
From a food industry perspective, the "fresh" in fresh pet food refers to a processing technique, not the degree of freshness of the product.
This is clearly different from consumers' intuitive perception. The difference in processing distinguishes fresh food from extruded kibble, baked kibble, and wet food, and different processing methods result in different levels of freshness in the final product.
For this emerging product category, the industry currently lacks unified processing standards. For example, compared to traditional pet food, fresh food currently lacks clear, unified standard data on parameters such as moisture content, total plate count, and transportation and storage methods.
Compared to the clear standards and management measures for pet staple food, fresh food is also in a regulatory gap, with not even group standards.
For complete pet dry and wet food used as staple food, the state has issued clear national standards. If pet food is registered as "complete," it must comply with the corresponding national standards and the "Pet Feed Hygiene Regulations." In addition, canned pet food must also meet the commercial sterility requirements in the "Pet Feed Hygiene Regulations."
Commercial sterility means that after moderate heat treatment, the food contains no pathogenic or non-pathogenic bacteria that can reproduce at room temperature, nor spores that can reproduce under normal storage conditions.
Due to differences in processing techniques, fresh food products cannot achieve commercial sterility, which means they not only have a short shelf life but also rely on cold storage and cold-chain transportation to ensure they do not spoil during circulation and storage.
These characteristics require more efficient coordination across the industry chain for quality control of fresh food, and the quality control threshold is higher.
Fresh Food Brands: A Slow Process
The above are the problems faced by entrepreneurs in the fresh food category, and some gaps even require the joint participation of more stakeholders.
MANKEE Muanqi, a fresh pet food brand founded in 2021, gave up cooperating with mature OEM factories and built its own factory to meet its product needs. The factory took nearly a year from construction to production to obtain production qualifications, and it is still continuously exploring and optimizing fresh food production processes.
Yi Fan, one of the founders of Muanqi, recalled to us that the first difficulty in building the factory was applying for the license.
This is partly because fresh pet food is a very new category for relevant regulatory authorities; and partly because the feed management regulations do not yet have specific management measures for this type of product.
Some peers in the industry, in order to smoothly obtain a feed license, use the production process materials of traditional canned or dry food to apply, and then produce fresh food after obtaining the license. But Yi Fan felt that applying according to the actual process is more conducive to establishing a branded fresh food factory: "We hoped to start a business in a more standardized way from the beginning."
With the support of relevant authorities, Yi Fan researched and demonstrated the cases and market sizes of similar US fresh pet food companies, and worked with regulatory authorities to study China's current regulations and product characteristics, ultimately obtaining the requirements and adjustment suggestions for issuing feed production licenses.
Yi Fan introduced that in order to obtain production approval, they optimized and tested the mixing uniformity of fresh food products and formulated corresponding product standards to control the quality of fresh food products.
In addition, the production line, designed with reference to human food factories, has undergone multiple adjustments.
The production process management of fresh pet food is different from human food. For example, they have designed different steaming time standards for different ingredients, and have more detailed standards for time and temperature control at each processing step. "This is a process of gradual improvement, and even today our processes are still being optimized," Yi Fan revealed.
After fresh food products are produced in the workshop, their quality control also requires close cooperation with the cold chain.
Relying on existing third-party cold-chain transportation services, trunk cold transport can already achieve good quality control, but problems are more likely to occur in the delivery segment. To address this, Zhi Chan, another founder of Muanqi, told us that after the product begins shipping, Muanqi sends users a message reminding them to receive the goods as soon as possible and provides detailed storage suggestions on the product detail page. During high summer temperatures, dry ice is also added to the express packaging to ensure product quality.
In Zhi Chan's view, the demand for fresh food in the entire domestic market is still in its early stages. Although fresh food can replace dry food as a dog's staple, as a brand-new category, Muanqi hopes customers will first accept the concept of scientific feeding, incorporate fresh food products into their dogs' daily diet, and then continuously guide users to increase the proportion of fresh food in daily feeding.
Cultivating demand will be a relatively longer process.
Zhi Chan is optimistic about the value of emerging channels like Pet Fresh Fresh entering. "We really hope that big capital will enter, so that the concept of fresh food can be spread more widely. Relying on us alone is far from enough; this category needs everyone to work together to develop."
Although from the outside, the attention and discussion around fresh pet food are increasing, from the perspective of both entrepreneurs and researchers, fresh pet food is still a niche track.
The gaps in definition, standards, and regulation make this industry a mixed bag beneath the surface. The demand side is also in the stage of consumer education.
As an emerging pet food category, fresh food has emerged and grown in line with the current trend of changing pet ownership concepts in China. However, the healthy development of this emerging category in the future still requires the industry to fill in more missing slow work.