Getting a pet to take their medication is not an easy task. Many pet owners are familiar with stories like covering a pill in peanut butter just to find out the dog has licked the peanut butter off while avoiding the pill or the owner trying to pretend the pill is a treat just to see their pet ignore it completely.

Bernadine Cruz, DVM, a member of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), finds that between half and two-thirds of her clients prescribed medicine for their pets fall off after about six months. “In spite of their desire to help their pets maintain a high quality of life, they tend to have a low adherence rate,” she says. In fact, clients stop giving their pets certain medications as quickly as five or six days, she adds. As with adherence to human medication, this problem can be both dangerous and expensive. So what can a pharmacist do?

Maryland, May 11, 2015

Columbia - It’s a fact of life. Most children don’t like taking medicine because of how bad it tastes or because it has a flavor they just don’t like. With FLAVORx, pharmacists are able to customize the taste of children’s liquid medicine to his or her favorite flavor. The FLAVORx app lets a person see what the best taste options are specifically for children’s medication and quickly locate a nearby pharmacy that offers the FLAVORx service.

Trust is a powerful way to capture the loyalty of a customer. It is also one of the hardest things for a business to earn, especially with younger customers. Millennials are more likely to trust people rather than companies, 73% of Millennials believe that consumers care more about their opinions than companies do. There are a lot of reasons why the Millennial generation has a hard time trusting businesses, but mainly it can be attributed to how they grew up.

Between events like, major oil spills, The Great Recession, and growing student debts, all taking place while still being very much impressionable, it is enough to make anyone lose trust in business. Millennials are going out of their way to get healthier, greener, socially conscious products and services. Products like Honest Tea, Warby Parker and Toms Shoes are becoming the norm because they are all very upfront with what they offer, and seem like the cleaner, more honest option.

It’s a simple fact, people no longer think of their pet as just domesticated animals, but more of a member of the family. Because of this transition, sales of U.S. pet products and services are continuing to grow. In 2014, sales for pet products and services reached $73 billion dollars and according to experts these sales will only continue to grow.

Why is this information important to you? Because pets are just another way for you to expand the sales to your existing customers as well as attract more customers to your pharmacy! By filling prescriptions for animals, you open your pharmacy up to be a one-stop-shop, people are able to pick up their whole families medication all in one spot.