Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 12, 1995                   TAG: 9504120060
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: OLMSTED, ILL.                                LENGTH: Medium

LITTER-MAKERS SCRATCH OUT CLEANER LIVING WITH CATS

Making a cat litter that pleases both human and beast drives a $700 million industry that will go to extremes to achieve what is known as ``the perfect clump.''

``We're putting dirt in a bag, but we give value to that dirt by adding to it something the consumer wants to buy,'' said Marvin Raymond, research and development director at Golden Cat Corp., the nation's cat litter leader with nearly one-third of the market.

Raymond holds a jar containing what looks like a thumb-size nugget of dark, sugar-coated chocolate. It's really a piece of clay that formed into a hard, easily scoopable clod when a cat urinated on it - the perfect clump.

South Bend, Ind.-based Golden Cat, with about $200 million in sales, doesn't stop there. At its Cape Girardeau, Mo., research and development center, there are sniffing booths where folks rate a clump's odor control, and sophisticated drop tests where clumps are hit with weights to see how well they hold up.

Nearby, a clean, brightly lit ``cattery'' holds more than 40 cats only too happy to provide Raymond and his fellow chemists all the samples they want.

Golden Cat's quest to transform Buffy's excretions into solid profits starts in its three mines. From the hillsides, excavators dig clay prized for its ability to absorb 90 percent of its weight in moisture. It's then crushed, dried and mixed with a blend of deodorizers and other ingredients.

The 110-employee plant in Olmsted, in far southern Illinois, bags about 180,000 tons of cat litter annually. Company officials say that's enough to take care of 600,000 cats for a year.

Those in the industry have plenty to be happy about, too.

The number of American households with cats rose from 24.2 million in 1983 to 30.2 million a decade later, according to Freedonia Group Inc., a Cleveland-based business research company.

By 1998, it's expected that nearly one in every three households will care for at least one cat, with the average being 2.7 cats.

That bodes well for cat litter. Freedonia Group estimates that demand will rise 15 percent between 1993 and 1998, from 1.95 million tons to 2.24 million.

Much of the credit is given to clumping, or scoopable, litter, a finer clay-and-additive mix that hit the market five years ago. Unlike regular litter, the scoopable type forms a hard ball around urine, lengthening the time between cat-box changes.

``Consumers just gravitated to it to the point that close to 40 percent of revenue is in the form of scoopable. It's a premium product, and that certainly has benefited the industry,'' said Robert Bartels, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago.

Future cat-box fillers also might be more environmentally friendly. Golden Cat is test-marketing its Nature Fresh brand, with pellets of recycled newsprint it claims absorb 100 percent more odor-causing moisture than clay.

Ralston Purina Co. agreed recently to buy 450-employee Golden Cat, which had been operating under heavy debt since an investment group bought it in 1990. Terms were not disclosed.