Freshpet's (FRPT -0.05%) numbers show that the company has been successful with finding new customers. However, not every pet that tries its product likes it.
In this segment of Upgrade or Topgrade, Fool contributor Jeremy Bowman and Millionacres Editor Deidre Woollard discuss some of Freshpet's weak spots, including the pet food itself on occasion.
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Deidre Woollard: Well, I need to read this comment from Stewart from Slido who says that, "My cat turned its nose up on Freshpet and didn't eat a bite." That is the risk with Freshpet, because if your animal doesn't eat it, that's pretty much it. There's different flavors within Freshpet, but it's not like the kibble thing where it's like, my cat did like this one, so I'll just. Even within an individual company's branding, there's multiple flavors or multiple things you can try. There's not a lot within Freshpet. Usually if you try Freshpet once and your pet doesn't like it, you're probably not going to try it again.
Jeremy Bowman: I have fed my dog Freshpet. He seemed to like it. He's pretty picky eater. I've now moved on to making him pet food from ground turkey and vegetables and rice.
Woollard: [laughs] Wow. That's a commitment.
Bowman: He's a really difficult dog to feed. As far as my personal experience, I'd say went pretty good with Freshpet.
Woollard: For How long did you feed your dog Freshpet?
Bowman: It was a few months, and we were mixing it. I think Freshpet is definitely more expensive also with dry kibble. That's worth keeping in mind. It's more of a premium product, so we would mix it with dry food, and we did that for several months. I think at least with him it seems that he likes something for a while and gets. He gets bored or we like to mix it up a little. I can't remember why we stopped buying it. It might have been the thing too that we were moving around during the pandemic. Sometimes you can find it and sometimes you can't. It's not as easy to keep in stock as a big bag of dry kibble either.
Woollard: That is a really good point. But you brought up something also I want to dive in on to and I do this too, is that we believe that our animals need variety. This is a thing that never used to happen. When I was growing up I think the cats eat the same kind of foods my entire childhood like our friend dogs too. You've bought same bag of food, the pet aisle was not as large you'd pick up your bag of Purina and you'd get the same bag for years and years and years. Now, we're in this world where we just have as many options as people food. We believe to some extent, I think that our animals need that variety and all of that is fueling all of the revenue of these companies. Is this human behavior that we transferred onto our pets? I don't think that's going away anytime soon. We talked about it as a pandemic trend, but this is a way before the pandemic trend, dog outfits alone is a whole thing.
