The celebrity chef has created dog food and treat recipes for her Nutrish line

It makes good sense for the petfood industry to help prevent and treat pet obesity

In addition to transparency, Whole Dog Journal examines the ingredients listed on the product labels and looks for, among other things, the absence of by-products, added sweetners and artificial coloring.

Pros and cons: Which ones are right for your products?

And gives retailers a lot of merchandising support

As the status of pets continues to rise, many pet owners seem willing to put more time into preparing meals for their pets. Several companies are catering to pet owners who want to get more involved with feeding their pets. If the market continues to develop, which seems likely, we can expect to see more major marketers of traditional commercial diets adding high-involvement petfoods to their product lines.

In The Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil examines what he calls the next step in our evolutionary progress: the union of humans and computers. He believes that the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing ability of computers

The rising popularity of petfoods containing functional ingredients can be traced to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994. This US legislation restricted some of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) authority to act against functional ingredients as unapproved food additives. This led to a vast influx of such products for people and influenced similar trends in petfood.

It just keeps getting better for the petfood industry. In emerging markets, the combination of income growth, increasing urbanization and better marketing is creating favorable conditions for petfood sales.