Organic pet food sales grow after pet deaths

The New York Times has a piece about the steady growth in this industry:

Pet Promise pledges its foods are made from “source-verified, natural ingredients.” Although a 25-pound bag of its dog food costs around $43, compared with around $24 for a 50-pound bag of the conventional stuff, sales rocketed by 300 percent at the height of the recall, says its co-founder, Dave Carter. But the company didn’t sustain those supercharged growth levels; for all of 2007, Pet Promise had high double-digit growth, which was in line with annual growth trends in previous years. After all, the natural and organic pet-food category has expanded at a steady clip for a while.... Yet the category remains a very thin slice of the pet-food business — probably less than 1 percent. Pet-food sales in grocery and mass-merchandise stores, which sell a lot of regular pet food, took a hit in the second quarter of 2007, according the Nielsen Company, but had rebounded by the end of the year.