How to Build A Cannabinoid Pet Brand in 2024 [Updated]

Posted 2 years ago by GVB Biopharma Evidence Based

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When CBD pet products first appeared on the market, brands faced heavy skepticism as they attempted to explain why CBD is useful for pets. Over the last decade, however, pet CBD products have sporadically gained popularity, sometimes boasting massive 1,000% year-over-year gains.

These days, the CBD pet industry is valued at over half a billion dollars, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing CBD product subcategories. As 2023 unfolds, new opportunities and challenges will appear for brands that are active in the pet CBD space.

Leveraging recent data from Statista, we can identify the consumers most likely to purchase CBD pet products and understand their preferences. This insight allows us to develop a pet product line that offers maximum value with minimal drawbacks.

This guide explores the recent growth of the CBD pet category and where these products are gaining traction. By the end, you’ll know what 2024 consumers want in hemp pet products and how to build your brand.

Who buys CBD products?

To market a product effectively, a brand should follow a few key steps. The first step is finding out who already buys that product. In the case of CBD pet products, the answers are easy to find thanks to a March 2021 shopper survey¹ published on Statista.

This survey of more than 1,500 respondents sought to determine where people who buy CBD pet products live. Categories of communities included major cities, suburbs, and small towns.

Although pet ownership is widespread, Statista found most CBD pet product buyers live in cities, where demand is higher. Urban residents are far more likely to buy CBD pet products than those in small towns or suburbs.

Pet health as a cosmopolitan concern

These statistical results make sense. City-dwellers are often more affluent and socially plugged in, allowing pricier trends like CBD to catch on more easily.

Rural shoppers may consider CBD pet products but lack the exposure urbanites have. Target rural areas with educational social media campaigns during product launches.

There’s also the well-understood fact that people who live in cities are just more likely to closely follow trends. While attempting to widen the market for CBD pet products beyond major cities, it’s also important to avoid alienating your urban residents.

What do pet owners want in CBD products?

Before patients discussed CBD with physicians, veterinarians explored its potential for pets. Many pet owners still consult vets before trying CBD, demonstrating the importance of vet recommendations in the decision-making process.

According to the results of another Statista survey² (conducted in cooperation with Brightfield Group), pet owners have a common set of concerns they frequently bring up in the vet’s office. Chief among these concerns appears to be the safety of CBD, which was the most popular topic for pet owners to bring up with their vets when considering the cannabinoid for their pets. These discussions highlight the need for brands to educate both vets and consumers about their products.

Owners asked vets about CBD’s effectiveness for pets, proper dosages, and which CBD products work best for specific animals. Providing answers to these questions on product packaging and marketing materials can help bridge the knowledge gap.

Safety

CBD is considered safe, but pet owners often confirm this with vets. Providing detailed safety information on labels and online helps build trust. Including third-party lab results or certifications can further reassure pet owners of product quality.

Effectiveness

When consulting their veterinarians, pet owners want to make sure CBD will work. As long as you don’t overdo it, this is your call to make sure your CBD pet products contain a reasonable, effective dose of CBD. Highlighting real-life testimonials or case studies of successful outcomes can also instill confidence in your products.

Dosage

Veterinarians often lack clear answers on proper CBD dosages for animals. Offering potent, portionable products, like a 10mg dog biscuit breakable into 2.5mg pieces, helps address this issue. Including dosage guidelines based on pet size or weight can simplify decision-making for pet owners.

Product Type

There’s no wrong answer when it comes to which CBD product type is best for pets. CBD-infused pet treats and CBD tinctures designed for pets are the most popular options to be sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only CBD pet product categories worthy of your consideration.

Some pets might prefer for CBD oil to be added to their food, but others might like CBD treats best. There may be even more pet-favorite CBD product types that simply haven’t been explored properly yet.

Is pet CBD popular?

There’s a reason brands and investors are leaning so heavily into the pet side of the CBD industry. While CBD products designed for humans continue to gain impressive popularity year-over-year, pet CBD has exhibited the greatest breakthrough success in recent years, sometimes boasting nearly unbelievable gains.

According to a Statista survey³ published in November 2022, for instance, sales of pet CBD products in the United States grew tenfold between 2018 and 2019. What began as a market only worth a few million dollars in 2017 was estimated to appreciate to over $500 million in 2021, which is a remarkable rate of growth even for the CBD industry.

10x year-over-year category growth

How was it possible for CBD pet products to display such rapid, voluminous growth? The ten-times increase that CBD pet products displayed between 2018 and 2019 might be partially attributed to the breakout success that sometimes occurs when a previously unknown product type enters the mainstream.

CBD pet products haven’t displayed such prodigious year-over-year growth again, but the category continues to outpace many other types of CBD products, indicating that the CBD pet market is far from tapped.

$560 million in 2021

With sales exceeding half a billion dollars, CBD pet products are a small but significant opportunity for brands seeking diversification. As the CBD industry grows, CBD pet products will grow along with it.

Guide to selling pet CBD in 2024

Now that you’re aware of the potential waiting to be fulfilled within the CBD pet industry, let’s shift to some practical tips you can use to formulate winning pet CBD products in 2024 and beyond. Below, we’ll list out six specific steps you can take to optimize or launch your line of CBD pet products:

1. Focus on urban priorities

Half of CBD pet product buyers live in big cities, where urbanites often embrace new health and wellness trends.

Today, people are deeply concerned about the safety of the food and supplements they consume. Urbanites who view pets as family expect the same safety and purity in pet products as in their own.

If your pet products include ingredients acceptable only for animals, now is the time to align with your audience’s priorities. Urban CBD shoppers willingly pay more for pet products they trust to be safe and high-quality.

2. Showcase safety

You can relate to shoppers that your products are safe in a variety of ways, starting with clear and effective labeling. Stick with an easy-to-read theme, and use small icons and symbols that shoppers already associate with desired attributes like “organic” and “non-GMO.”

Today’s educated urban consumers want to be able to research products they’re considering buying on the internet. Make sure the online information accompanying your product is thorough, professional, and easy to find.

Lab reports can help relate to shoppers that your products are potent and toxin-free, but some of the most-educated CBD consumers now know enough to ask where the CBD extract in their products came from as well. That’s when it can be useful to be able to tell extra-inquisitive customers that you sourced your CBD from a professional, certified lab.

3. Respect the importance of dosage

Recent statistical data show that pet CBD shoppers are concerned with giving the right dose of CBD to their cats and dogs. As it is in humans, CBD appears to be quite safe in other mammals, but still, it can’t be helped that shoppers want to know exactly how much CBD they’re giving their pets.

They also want to be sure the amount of CBD they’re giving their pets isn’t harmful, which is where gentle education regarding the interspecies safety of CBD as a compound can come in. It’s important to accommodate this trend primarily, however, by making it easy for pet owners to use your products to give their pets exact doses of CBD.

4. Differentiate within a growing category

Over the last few years, pet CBD underwent the massive, ballooning growth that has occurred at one time or another in every other CBD product subcategory. Now that the market is approaching saturation, however, it’s important to anticipate a more-competitive future environment in which proper diversification will be necessary to ensure that your CBD pet products stand out.

Simply focusing on organic purity, for instance, can be enough to make your product noticeable to shoppers — and in a genuine way that imparts real value.

5. Demand professional formulation

Achieving optimum quality with CBD products isn’t easy. Hemp extract is inherently a tricky substance to work with, and shoppers increasingly demand higher and higher standards of safety and purity.

If you attempt to make CBD pet products in your own facilities, you won’t be able to compete with larger operators that have the resources to invest in better equipment and advanced processes. Since purchasing CBD from a bulk producer is often less expensive than making it yourself, the choice here is clear.

There’s a massive disparity even between large-scale CBD producers, though. Make sure to choose a producer that proactively seeks out all available certifications and properly prioritizes transparency.

6. Anticipate massive growth

Lastly, don’t forget that pet CBD remains one of the fastest-growing CBD subcategories, and it will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. There are still plenty of pet owners who would buy CBD if they were educated on its benefits and came across the right product.

When formulating your CBD pet line, focus on the universal appeal that’s necessary to allow a product to become popular. Even though it’s taking hold in the cities first, pet CBD is gradually becoming mainstream. The products that survive the test of time will be those that seamlessly blend the priorities of urbanites with the universally accessible benefits that will be demanded of the future’s pet CBD.

Summary: Should You Build A Cannabinoid Pet Brand in 2024

While 2019 may have been the year that pet CBD broke through to the surface, 2024 could prove to be the year that the CBD pet product phenomenon becomes fully mainstream. Purchases of pet CBD products may be slanted toward cities for now, but people everywhere are talking about CBD with their vets, and the pet CBD submarket gets closer to an inevitable $1 billion valuation every day.

To make sure your pet CBD products are successful in 2024 and the years beyond, position yourself as an assistant in the ambassadorship urbanites always display toward rural residents. Trends that start in the cities inevitably make their way into the countryside, so it’s only a matter of time before rural owners start giving their pets CBD in greater numbers.

Even though organic product purity isn’t as much of a concern for rural shoppers, they’ll accept the same products that have been presented to urbanites due to the naturally downstream position of rural culture from city culture. Wherever they live, what everyone appreciates is clear, informative product labeling. If rural shoppers are provided with everything they need to know about CBD pet products, they won’t be so concerned if the subtler attributes of a particular product differ from their exact preferences.

It’s a scientific fact that nearly all animals have endocannabinoid systems, meaning they’re biochemically compatible with the benefits cannabinoids like CBD have to offer. Never forget as well that the endocannabinoid system encompasses much more than just CBD — not even hardly explored yet is the wide world of potential lying in wait for CBN, CBG, and CBDV pet products.