Fish Food Choice, Value, Composition

Tetra fish food is still a very large seller in pond stick food form. This company have done an excellent fish food marketing job over many years.

I have long promoted that all buyers of fish food should read the contents label carefully in order to save money on their fish food bill. This topic is covered in a detailed article elsewhere so I am not going to regurgitate it here. except to say do not buy fish food with more than 10% ash in it unless you know why.

Instead lets talk about premium fish food sticks. Such premium fish food is heavily promoted by leading producers with one German company, Tetra, in particular being the leader in this field. This company in fact is the inventor, I think, of the floating fish food stick and over the years they have done a remarkable marketing job of convincing many people to buy premium fish food sticks against all evidence that they are really good value for money.

In the early days of artificial pond and fish keeping the only food available to buy was food made to feed trout and similar farmed fish. The trouble was this type of food was first of all not formulated for feeding to carp types (koi and goldfish) and the food sank to the bottom immediately. Now this sinking factor was not all that serious since carp are natural bottom feeders but fish pond owners like to see their fish eating (don't we all) so the market need for a floating form of fish food was born ... forget flaked fish food used in aquariums and mainly which is ridiculously expensive.

Tetra, a German company, accepted the challenge and I believe created the first commercially available fish food stick that reliably floated. On the back of excellent technology and marketing they established a multinational market that thrives still today.

The reason that early forms of floating koi food was in stick format was due to the manufacturing method in which all the necessary ingredients were first blended together before being extruded under heat and pressure using steam. The extruder forced the compounded materials through a die plate with circular holes in it and as the sphagetti-like extrudate appeared from these holes the stick cylindrical shape was produced. The strand could be chopped into different lengths to make smaller sticks.

The process allowed entrapment of air to take place as the material extruded from high pressure to low and this gave the cylindrical shape its floating capability.

Today sticks are available in all flavours, colours, sizes and formulations but they suffer from a significant disadvantage ... the cost per unit of mass and especially per unit of protein is normally very significantly higher than a similarly formulated floating koi food pellet. One possible reason for this is the incremental freight component (although I doubt this very much) because the bulk density of sticks is lower than that for pellets. I suspect the real reason is that manufacturers, distributors, retailers and any other party in the chain all make higher profit margins on the back of marketing investment going back many years and which still remains today.

Next time you think of buying sticks just do a quick comparison calculation as follows ... make sure you use consistent units which means use pounds or ounces, kilograms or grams but not a mixture

For Sticks

Weight of pack = WS

Price of pack = PS

Cost per unit weight = PS/WS

For Pellets

Weight of pack = WP

Price of pack = PP

Cost per unit weight = PP/WP

Compare the 2 anwers and you might find a big difference.

Varying pack weights between sticks and pellets is a well known "trick" of making pricing comparisons very difficult for most busy shoppers.

You will probably also find that protein content of the stick is lower than that for pellets which always counts in favour of buying the pellet from a cost/benefit perspective.

I used to sell both sticks and pellets ... I only sell pellets these days.