Pet Food Taster

Would you ever consider taking the job of pet food taster? The very idea would make most of us cringe, but the reality is that there are approximately 90 million pet dogs in America, and that’s just dogs. There are many other pets too. As far as we know, none of these pets can talk, so the only way to tell if they enjoy their food is to, well, try it ourselves. Ok, maybe that is a little extreme, but there needs to be a way to know if their food tastes good. We already know that pets tend to like “people food,” so that should give us an idea of their taste in food, right? Still, to actually taste the food the dogs are going to eat. I just don’t know. I suppose that the $45,000 annual salary might be some incentive…for some people.

More and more pet foods are becoming more of a gourmet kind of cuisine these days. There are brands like Farmer’s Dog, Ollie, Spot and Tango, The Pets Table, We Feed Raw, and A Pup Above, just to name a few. All these gourmet pet food brands need refrigeration, because they have “human grade ingredients” in them. As any pet owner will tell you, a cat or a dog won’t hesitate to show their distaste for a meal. So, is there really a need for a “Pet Food Taster” to decide if the food tastes good. Of course, taste is not the only purpose of the pet food taster. They are primarily there to evaluate the nutritional value of pet food. For so long the nutritional value of pet food was severely lacking and really considered unimportant. Then as the health of the pets declined, veterinarians, pet owners, and dog food manufacturers began to understand that pet bodies needed more than just meat byproduct fillers in their food. And the taste of that old pet food…well, maybe a human needed to taste it once in a while.

While I can see that being a pet food taster might be an occupation with some value, it is definitely not the kind of occupation I could see myself in. Not being a pet owner could be part of the reason, but even if I were, I think I would have to take the manufacturer’s word, or that of the veterinarian as to which food would be the best.