When a brand chooses a delivery format for their animal supplement or pharmaceutical, it’s not just about marketing – it’s about palatability, dosing accuracy, stability and manufacturability.

Soft Chews: The Convenience Champion

Soft chews are chewable, palatable bites for daily vitamins, joint support, calming formulas and many over-the-counter pet health supplements as well as pharmaceuticals. To animals, they’re positioned as treats and to owners, they are an owner-friendly way to ensure compliance.

Advantages of soft chews include:

• High palatability and owner acceptance.
• Easy to administer.
• Excellent for products where flavor and texture help adherence, such as daily vitamins, probiotics and calming supplements.
• Opportunities for brand differentiation via shapes, flavors and textures.

Powders: Formula Flexibility

Powder formulations can be mixed into food or water and are common for multivitamins, digestive aids, joint blends and probiotics.

Advantages of powder include:

• Highly flexible and easy to blend many active ingredients, adjust dose strengths and launch variants without changing delivery hardware.
• Often perceived as “100% active ingredient” by some consumers (i.e. no large filler tablets).
• Economical to produce and ship, due to their lower weight and volume, compared with some wet formats.

According to recent data from Nextin Research by MarketPlace, nearly 30% of dog owners who responded indicated that powder kibble food toppers was their top choice of delivery system for dog supplements and another nearly 30% said the same about powder food toppers – an upward trend from previous research.

Pellets: Consistency and Performance

Compressed, pelletized formats are commonly used in equine, livestock and some companion-animal supplement supplements or pharmaceuticals where controlled release, targeted palatability or feed integration is needed.

Advantages of pellets include:

• Excellent for integrating into feed systems and for products where geometry and density influence intake and dissolution.
• Often easier to meter into feed or dosing systems.

Liquids: Rapid Onset and Dosing Flexibility

Syrups, suspensions or ready-to-use liquids for oral dosing are often used when rapid absorption is required or for medicated top-ups.

Advantages of liquids include:

• Easier to titrate dose by weight/volume for individual animals.
• Good for actives that are unstable in dry form but stable in solution or suspension.

Format choice is strategic: the same active ingredient can behave very differently in a soft chew versus a powder versus a pellet or liquid. Precision Science combines hands-on formulation expertise, dedicated manufacturing lines for each format, and a commercial team that helps translate a concept into a compliant, scalable product that pets will accept and owners will buy.