Vegan pet food becomes more famous following the veganism in human food. In Russia and other post-Soviet countries, there are still a lot of prejudices. So far vegan pet food holds a hardly measurable market share.
The consulting agency Insight Partner predict a growth from US$9.3 billion in 2021 to US$15.6 billion by 2028 US$9.3 billion in 2021 to US$15.6 billion by 2028.
The vegan trend enjoys great popularity across Europe. Still in Russia veganism is considered a “malignant Western trend“. Russians believe that living vegan is harmful to humans. Regarding vegan pet food, Russian pet specialists think, it is “nothing less but torture for pets”. The most popular brands are Ami Dog and FT. The pet owners buy their vegan pet food online from European stores but because of high logistic costs, it is mostly unaffordable.
Nevertheless, over the last years one could observe that the Russian pet food market followed the global pet food trends after a couple of years.
“If there is a demand, there will be product range. We see that the share of our citizens recognizing themselves as vegetarians is close to 10%. We can expect the share of vegan pet food to stand close to this figure in just a few years,” Kolchanova stated.
Another source in a Russian pet food company confirmed: “This market is still in embryo, and I would not expect to grow it outside the biggest cities—Moscow and St. Petersburg—at least not soon. However, we already see a rising demand for vegan pet food, and customers in this segment are willing to pay a good price, so it is worth some R&D investment.“
Rostislav Vovk, co-owner of Ukraine’s largest pet food producer, Kormotech, named the demand for vegetrarian pet food one of the main trends in Ukraine’s pet food market. “For instance, pet owners [who are] vegetarians want to feed their pets with a meat- and fish-free food,” he commented.
Actually, there is a growth in the demand for human all vegan food in the post-Soviet areas. In Russia, for example, the demand tripled between 2015 and 2020 to 45,000 tons. In Ukraine, 11% of the people totally abstained from meat.
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