AUSTIN, TEXAS — Pet Honesty has introduced a first-of-its-kind cat supplement line that offers convenience to pet parents as they seek to assuage their finicky felines’ health and wellness needs. The dual-texture, pillow-style supplements mimic a format popular among cat treats, while also delivering key active ingredients to address hairball issues, anxious behavior and mobility.

“We expect compliance to be much better, so rather than having to disguise powders in a wet food or encouraging a cat eat a soft chew, which usually has suboptimal acceptability, we're hoping this can be a positive feeding experience that the cats will look forward to,” said Greg Reinhart, Ph.D., vice president of research and development at Pet Honesty. “…It all starts with intake — if the cat won't consume it, there's not going to be a benefit.”

Each supplement features a crunchy outer casing and a creamy filling. Reinhart told Pet Food Processing the company spent more than a year developing and testing this dual-texture format as a vehicle for delivering functional ingredients. Pet Honesty leveraged Reinhart’s extensive pet industry experience — including the publication of more than 250 scientific, peer-reviewed papers and abstracts on dog and cat nutrition — to guide its latest cat supplement innovation as it sought proven ingredients for each need state.

“The trick is taking studied active ingredients and figuring out how we could get them into a format that a cat will eat,” said Eric Dahmer, chief marketing officer at Pet Honesty. “This solution is among the first of its kind in our category on the marketplace.

“The pet supplement space has been growing rapidly,” he added. “We kept noticing that cat owners didn't express a whole lot of excitement or satisfaction with the types of formats available to them. The selective nature of cats when it comes to what they eat was one of the hurdles, and Greg's experience, especially with this format in other categories, led us down this path.”

The line currently includes three formulas in chicken flavors: Hairball Support, Calming, and Hip + Joint Health. The Hairball Support supplement formula contains three different fiber sources, including apple pomace and psyllium husk, as well as and fish oil and zinc to address both hairball control and skin and coat health.

“We know that with hairball conditions, you want to have active ingredients and nutrients that help promote healthy skin and coat,” Reinhart explained. “You want to have actives like Omega 3s that will promote a healthy skin and coat and reduce excessive shedding, and you want to provide fiber that will create a mat, which traps that hair and helps reduce the likelihood that it'll accumulate in the stomach and be regurgitated up.”

The Calming supplement aims to promote relaxation and manage nervous or anxious behaviors through natural ingredients. The formula includes thiamine, L-theanine, tryptophan and chamomile.

“L-theanine is an active found in green tea that helps reduce stress levels and lower cortisol, which is a proxy for stress levels,” Reinhart said. “Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, but when it's metabolized it produces serotonin that causes relaxation.”

The Hip + Joint Health supplement is formulated with glucosamine — “a building block for the lining of the joints,” according to Reinhart — as well as green lipped mussel, which delivers Omega 3 fatty acids, and manganese, all to reduce stiffness and maintain joint mobility.

“A new ingredient that we're really excited about is called calcium fructoborate,” Reinhart explained. “It is a very powerful natural ingredient that helps reduce joint stiffness and maintain normal structure, and we're super excited to see how that performs in-home.”

Pet Honesty’s end goal was not only to deliver functional, active ingredients to cats, but to do so in a way that was easier and more enjoyable both for cats and their owners.

According to Reinhart, an acceptability rate above 70% for a cat supplement is pretty good. In the development of its new cat supplement line, Pet Honesty set the bar a little higher and delivered. Independent palatability testing showed the company’s new cat supplements were accepted by nine out of 10 cats, resulting in acceptances rates exceeding 90%.

“Creating cat supplements that combine an appealing smell, taste, and texture was a priority for us,” said Ali Dyer, product manager and cat innovation lead at Pet Honesty. “Cats are notoriously particular, and they’ll be completely honest about what they like and don’t like. It was important to us to create a supplement they would honestly love, so the popular dual texture format for cats was worth exploring as a unique solution for cat supplements.”

Alongside Reinhart’s product development expertise, Dahmer’s prior experience in the human vitamin and supplement space helped inspire the company to think outside the box in the development of its new cat supplements.

“This kind of format for cats is a little bit like gummies are to human supplements,” Dahmer said. “Suddenly, it feels like you’re eating candy — you're able to get your daily supplement more enjoyably. We hope that this will provide the same kind of difference for cats as well.”

All Pet Honesty products are built on the foundation of its Product Pledge, which requires the company to use only natural and other premium ingredients that offer specific benefits. The company does not use corn, soy, wheat, artificial preservatives, colors or flavors in any of its formulas. Only when those parameters are met will the company begin to incorporate active ingredients.

“The one thing that's really important to us is that our products are well received by the dog and the cat,” Reinhart said. “We do thorough investigations to verify that they are readily accepted, and we're proud of that work and very happy with the outcomes. But we're never satisfied, and we’re always trying to take it a step higher as we do something like a new cat supplement, where we're trying to solve the consumer issue without violating that Product Pledge bedrock. That bedrock is at the core of who we are as a brand — it’s in our name.”

Pet Honesty’s new cat supplements are currently available on Chewy.com. The company plans to roll the product out to more than 1,500 Petco stores, as well as on Petco.com, Amazon.com and PetHonesty.com, in early November.

While it may be too early to pinpoint how this new line will evolve in the future, Dahmer noted the company will continue to explore other well-documented need states and gaps in the cat nutrition space to inform future innovations within its cat portfolio.

“Our mission is to elevate pet wellness every day,” Dahmer said. “Pets are part of the family now — they're not just an animal in the house, they're truly a four-legged member of our families. Our mission does not stop at dogs, although that's where we've started, and we're really excited that when we start expanding and providing to new pets like cats, we're doing it with the best ingredients, the most natural formulas we can bring, and elevating not just efficacy but also enjoyability.”

Read more about new pet food and treat products.