According to the US Department of Agriculture, tomatoes are the second most popular vegetable crop behind potatoes, with an annual average per capita consumption of 71 pounds going into juice, sauce and paste. The backstory is that 10-30% of this is seeds, skin and pulp, with no ready market in the human food aisle. This translates into an estimated 750,000 metric tons of dried tomato pomace potentially available to pet and livestock feed markets.
Given that the US ranks about fifth in the world acreage of tomatoes grown, tomato pomace could be a readily available ingredient for petfood. To that end, we are seeing a growing number of petfoods for which tomato pomace appears on the ingredients list.
