Note: The following is an excerpt from the new white paper "Terminology Tempest in the Dairy Case" by David Sprinkle, Research Director of Packaged Facts. To read the entire white paper, download it here for free.

The recent European Union Court of Justice ruling against marketing of non-dairy soy / soya products in dairy terms (such as soy “milk” or tofu “butter”) was the right call, narrowly speaking.

A seismic shift is occurring in the private label credit card industry, brought about by a mixture of mobile app technology, customer relationship management advances, geolocational marketing initiatives, and closed loop virtual card payments. In this respect, the physical card that for long embodied the face of this industry is beginning to fade, subsumed by omni-channel loyalty platforms that provide not only a seamless customer purchasing and rewards experience across channels, but also the opportunity to tailor marketing messages to those customers with a degree of specificity never before possible.

Food industry research has been binging on sandwiches, a culinary form for which the U.S. market is the world’s center of gravity, not least because of eager adoption and adaptation of favorite sandwich formats and fillings from around the world. 

Sales-wise, the impulse to give treats to pets is the gravy of the pet food market. According to Simmons National Consumer Survey data from Experian Marketing Services, 79% of dog owners and 47% of cat owners buy pet treats. Among U.S. households overall (total households, not just pet-owning households), 38% buy dog or cat treats—for perspective, that’s about the same percentage as those that buy crackers.

Digital technologies have disrupted industry after industry, and consumer packaged goods are up next. Amazon, notably, continues to launch new services and sales platforms such as Prime Pantry and Subscribe & Save—along with its Prime Air plans for delivering products by drones to consumers, notwithstanding recent regulatory setbacks from the FAA. Traditional retailers are thinking more boldly as well, with Walmart focused on “winning at the intersection of digital and physical.”

Cat products account for over a third of sales in the CAN$2 billion Canadian pet products market, and Canadian cat owners are fully in step with the pet pampering and product premiumization trends that have long characterized the U.S. market. By some measures, in fact, Canadian cats are more than a whisker ahead. According to pet owner surveys conducted by Packaged Facts over the April to June 2014 period, 30% of Canadian cat owners purchase cat food formulations that feature poultry or meat as the first ingredient, compared with 19% of U.S. cat owners.