If you are responsible for procuring and purchasing commodity ingredients for your company's petfoods -- or you formulate with such ingredients -- you probably are already aware that 2013 is shaping up to be another challenging year. (The same is true for meat ingredients, since that meat often comes from animals that eat commodity grains.) But do you know where specific challenges lie and how to prevent or handle them?

Surveys conducted by the pet care website petMD.com show that many pet owners are confused about pet nutrition, petfood labels and ingredients and, more importantly, their own pets' nutrition needs. While the overall results may not surprise anyone in our industry, some of the individual survey findings might provide beneficial insights on how to address the problem.

At the start of trading today (January 9) on the Chicago Board of Trade, a bushel of corn was going for US$6.88, while wheat was at US$7.52 a bushel and soybeans, US$13.85 a bushel, according to Agriculture.com. While these prices have moderated somewhat from last fall's all-time highs, they still present challenges for the food industry and for petfood producers looking to obtain the ingredients they need at prices their budgets can accommodate.

Popular New Year's resolutions for people include losing weight, getting in better shape or similarly improving their health. Considering that so many pets are, like their owners, also fighting overweight or obesity, it would not be surprising if some pet owners put everyone in their families -- including the furry members -- on weight loss plans.

I know, at this time of year, everyone does one of these blog posts or columns trying to sum up the year for an industry or assign accolades and criticisms to entities within the industry. But as cliché as they may be, people tend to read such posts or columns, so I'll jump on the bandwagon and issue my "purrs and growls" for the petfood industry for 2012 and look ahead to opportunities for the coming year.

Though China's torrid economic growth has cooled down somewhat, specific industries still show huge potential for continued increases in the country. Those industries include pet care and petfood.

If you're looking to expand your knowledge about petfood and the many facets of our industry, you have two great opportunities to do so on Tuesday, December 11, sitting at the comfort of your own desk or wherever you might access your computer.  

The Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois, USA, has one of the world's leading--and very few--programs devoted to studying and researching companion animal nutrition. Its faculty and students are involved in much of the research that is published in top scientific journals on animal nutrition and that leads to breakthroughs in understanding pet nutrition and developing new ingredients and products for our industry.

"Natural: present in or produced by nature; of, relating to or concerning nature; not altered, treated or disguised." Those are just some of the definitions for the word that is showing up more and more on all types of consumer products, including petfood.

No surprise, but financial analysts focused on the agricultural sector are starting to predict lower suppliers -- and thus, higher prices -- for meat to hit in 2013, especially for beef, according to Reuters. That will likely push more consumers to buy chicken and pork, making those meat sources also in shorter supply for petfood producers.