We have been developing our fish bait for about 10 years now. We only started selling and marketing the bait for two years. The idea for a fish bait made from ground meat came about from a need we had to utilize meat scraps from our wild game processing plant. We have been in the meat cutting business for over 25 years. Each year we have tens of thousands of pounds of meat scraps that are thrown away. These scraps are picked up by commodity companies that use the meat scraps to make cat and dog food. They would pay a few cents per pound for the meat scraps. Each year they would pay less and less until a few years ago when they began charging us to haul the scraps away. This is when we began looking for some way to use the meat scraps ourselves. We first thought about making dog jerky but there are already several companies that make dog jerky and our product would not be anything new. We then decided to try making a fish bait out of the meat scraps. No other fish bait product is made with ground meat and we felt that this might give us a niche in the market. After some testing we found that the meat was very effective in catching fish. The last 10 years have been spent testing and perfecting our formula to turn ground meat scraps into a shelf stable, floating, moldable fish bait.

     We begin by testing anything that is added to the bait on trout in a laboratory experiment. The laboratory trout are given pieces of bait containing different ingredients (attractants, preservatives, dyes, ect...) and if the ingredient tastes good to the fish it would completely swallow and digest the bait. If the ingredient was distasteful to the fish it would immediately spit the bait out. The degree to which the fish found the ingredient tasteful/distasteful was measured by how long it would hold the bait in it's mouth: if it spat the bait out immediately the chemical was very distasteful but if it chewed on the bait for 10 or more seconds before spitting it out then that ingredientl was fairly tasteful to the fish. The longer that the fish chewed on the bait before spitting it out - the more acceptable it found the ingredients that were added to the bait. In this way we know that none of the things that we add to the bait are distasteful to the fish. Note that the ground meat that is used as the main ingredient in the bait would always score high on the above tests with fish always eating it immediately.
      After the bait was perfected in the laboratory then we would take it out and field test it on local lakes. We obtained a special fishing permit from the state of Utah for the purpose of testing the bait. This permit allowed people testing the bait to use up to 10 fishing poles at a time (with the restrictions that we could not use treble hooks and that we must immediately release all the fish that were caught). We would fish either from the shore or anchor our boat in the middle of the lake and set out at least 10 poles each one with something different on it. We would put out our own PREDATOR Fish Bait along with our competitor's baits to see which the fish liked the best. We also kept track of which colors were catching the most fish at that time. At times the fishing got so fast that we didn't even have time to sit down and record the results because we were catching and releasing fish nonstop. After many fishing trips and refining our bait formulation we would consistently catch at least as many fish, if not more, on our bait then on our competitor's baits. We also spent many fishing trips using only our bait comparing different attractants and formulations to determine what fish in the wild actually liked the best.

Member of the American Sportfishing Association