The Man Who Tests Pet Food

Learn something new every day. Article found on Itchmo which came from the source www.dailymail.co.uk

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This is Simon Allison, the man who eats pet food for a living.

Chicken dinners, beef strips or campfire jerky bars – it is all the same to him: if it’s a dog’s dinner (or cat’s breakfast), he eats it. What’s more, he enjoys it.

Mr Allison is a senior food technologist for Marks & Spencer with special responsibility for pet food. This means no M&S product goes into the nation’s pet bowls unless it has been tasted by him first.

He said: “No one asked me to taste it but this is what I do. It is just the same as if I was working in the ready meals department. I love my job. It is a brilliant area and eating the product is a fundamental part.

So, what does the man whose first pet food was a turkey and cranberry dinner in Christmas 2006 think of the taste?

“It’s quite bland, really,” he said. “Dogs enjoy all food universally, while cats can be very choosy about what they will eat. They respond more to aroma than seasoning flavours that you would recognise.”

Mr Allison, who has three cats at home – Pants, Socks and Vest – has a favourite pet food: the organic luxury chicken dinner with vegetables for cats.

Sniffing the product a bit like a professional wine taster, he said: “It has the taste and aroma of chicken and some of what you call the red flavours – things like heart and liver; gutsy, savoury notes. Then you get a mealy, green pea, pulse aroma and occasionally a sweeter note from the carrot.

“You have to chew it a bit. I have trained my palate to look for materials that we will not allow in the recipe, such as tripe – pet owners react badly to the smell of tripe.

“I’m looking for a paté texture, almost to the point where you could spread it on crusty bread. It has a very slightly gritty texture but overall it should be smooth – and studded with peas and carrots.”

Do cats like vegetables? No, but people do, said Mr Allison. “The more we can make the pet food like the owner’s food, the more comfortable we think customers will be serving it,” he explained.

Marks & Spencer even tries to apply some of the standards to the pet food that it does to its human-ready meals – ensuring the fish is responsibly sourced, for instance, and banning artificial flavours and colouring.

The human tester does, however, draw the line at swallowing the stuff – “I would be quite a different shape” – and always has a glass of water on hand to wash his mouth out.

Afterwards, he chews gum to prevent “dog breath”.

Source: Daily Mail