From a Belgian pet owner survey to a global formulation brief

What we heard at BEPEFA 2026: Six signals for pet food formulators

Based on the BEPEFA Annual Survey of Pets in Belgium 2026 (iVOX, N=1,500), cross-checked against European and North American market data.

We attended BEPEFA 2026, and one figure framed everything that followed: pet ownership in Belgium has stabilized at a high level, with 61% of Belgian households now owning at least one pet, unchanged from 2025 but still well above pre-COVID levels. That headline stability turned out to be the calm surface over a much more dynamic market underneath.

What follows is what we took away from the survey data presented at BEPEFA, before we did anything else with it. We then cross-checked each signal against broader European and North American sources, to see which of these observations are genuinely global and which are Belgium-specific. The distinction matters more than the headline numbers.

What we saw at BEPEFA 2026

Six signals stood out from the BEPEFA data. None of them are exotic on their own, but taken together, they sketch a market that is getting harder to serve with a static product range.

Dog vs. cat priorities are diverging. Dog ownership in Belgium rose from 24% of households in 2021 to 33% in 2026. Dog owners prioritize food adapted to breed and size, while cat owners prioritize price and palatability above all. 61% of cat owners say enjoyment of the food is something they always pay attention to. Both groups watch life-stage suitability closely, with over 85% paying attention to it.
Palatability is the single highest-scoring attribute, full stop. 56% of all Belgian pet owners always pay attention to whether their pet enjoys the food, ahead of price, life-stage fit, or breed suitability. It is the most common reason owners switch brands.
Sustainability is shifting from preference to expectation. 45% of Belgian pet owners would pay more for sustainable or ecologically responsible pet food; among owners under 35, that rises to 56%. At the same time, 65% say they would not change their care habits if prices rose.
New pet acquisition is a recurring, predictable event. 17% of Belgian households welcomed a new pet in 2025, two-thirds of them cats or dogs, and most of those were puppies or kittens. 46% of owners decide on a brand before they even enter the store, with vets and breeders as the key influence before that decision is made.
Purchase channels are fragmenting, and online is accelerating. Belgian pet owners buy across pet shops (72%), supermarkets (68%), online (58%, up from 52% in 2025), and veterinary clinics (40%). The online jump is the clearest year-on-year movement in the data.
Spending is resilient, but not unconditional. Average declared monthly pet spend in Belgium is €123 per household. If costs rose, 65% said they would absorb it rather than change habits, but 15% would trade down, and 11% would cut back on extras. That is a meaningful share of the market for any brand that gets cost pressure wrong.

Checking these signals against the broader market

BEPEFA is a Belgian study, conducted by iVOX. Before drawing any conclusions for formulation teams working across other markets, we cross-checked each of the six signals above against European industry data, APPA research for the US, and global market reports. The honest answer: most of it generalizes. One signal does not.

Signal from BEPEFA	Evidence strength	Note
Palatability is the #1 driver	Strong evidence	93% globally (independent research)
Premiumization & price resilience	Strong evidence	Confirmed in EU and US
Sustainability appetite	Strong evidence	EU regulatory mandate; growing in US
Online channel growth	Strong evidence	29% of US share by 2026
Breed/life-stage complexity	Strong evidence	Confirmed in EU and US
COVID-era dog ownership gains held	Market-specific	True for BE/UK; reversed in US (–10pp); mixed in DE/NL
17% new pet acquisition rate	Market-specific	Belgium figure; rate varies by country

The one exception worth flagging: the persistence of COVID-era dog ownership gains is genuinely Belgium- (and UK-) specific. In the US, dog ownership fell from 54% of households in 2020 to 44% in 2024. Germany and the Netherlands show signs of softening too. For manufacturers focused on the US market, the growth story is less about new dog households and more about deepening spend per existing owner — the formulation complexity argument still holds, but the volume driver differs by geography.

The other five signals hold up well outside Belgium. Palatability tops 93% of pet owners globally, by independent research, not just in our sample. Premiumization and sustainability are confirmed growth drivers in both Europe and the US, with the EU's 2030 recyclability mandate and tightening greenwashing rules pushing sustainability from marketing aspiration toward compliance requirement. Online distribution is projected to reach 29% of US pet food share in 2026. And breed- and size-specific formulation is mainstream across every major market we checked, not a Belgian niche.

What this means for formulation teams

Put the six signals together and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with any particular country: formulation teams are being asked to manage more variation, with tighter constraints, against a more volatile cost backdrop, than they were a few years ago.

Complexity is compounding, not additive. Breed variants, size variants, life-stage variants, sensitivity and health variants; these used to be handled one at a time. Now they stack. A two-SKU cat range and a three-SKU dog range no longer reflect what the market expects, and every new variant multiplies the number of recipes that need to stay internally consistent.

Constraints are pulling in different directions at once. The same consumer who wants their cat to enjoy dinner also wants it appropriate for a senior animal, suitable for sensitive digestion, and produced with a lower ecological footprint. Ingredients that drive palatability — animal proteins, fats, specific flavour profiles — can work against cost targets, sustainability goals, or nutritional limits for a given health condition. None of these constraints can be dropped to satisfy the others.

Cost volatility turns reformulation into a recurring task, not a one-off project. Spending is resilient at the consumer level, but that resilience does not protect manufacturer margin when a protein source spikes in price. The 15% of owners willing to trade down is enough volume to matter, which means the cost of a recipe has to stay defensible even as ingredient prices move.

Resolving these tensions through trial and error, or in a spreadsheet, gets harder as the number of variants grows. This is the gap that precision formulation software like BESTMIX is built to close: it lets a team hold palatability targets, nutritional constraints, sustainability metrics, and cost ceilings simultaneously, and find recipes that satisfy all of them rather than trading one off against another. Changes to a shared ingredient or nutrient specification can propagate across an entire recipe family at once, and when a protein source moves in price, alternative formulations can be modelled against the same constraints in minutes rather than days.

That is the practical answer to the question the BEPEFA data keeps raising: not whether formulation will get more complex — it will — but whether the tools in place can keep up with it without sacrificing precision on any single front.

Belgium triggered this. The implications travel.

BEPEFA is a Belgian survey of Belgian pet owners. But growing SKU complexity, the tension between palatability and other constraints, channel fragmentation, and margin exposure to commodity volatility are not Belgian problems. They are the operating reality of the pet food industry in 2026, in Amsterdam, Munich, Lyon, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Where Belgium is genuinely an outlier — the persistence of its COVID-era dog ownership gains — is a useful reminder that local dynamics still matter at the volume level, even when the underlying formulation challenge is identical everywhere else.

The question worth asking is the same regardless of geography: is your formulation process equipped to deliver palatability, nutritional precision, sustainability, and value, simultaneously, across a growing portfolio of SKUs?