EdRogers, did you happen to read the idea about creating game fish feed using a formula similar to FoodSource? One of the issues in feeding pond fish is to train them to take the feed.
I have very little experience feeding pond fish but here are some impressions; Floating food has the advantage of staying up where the fish can see it, but it tends to be dispersed by the wind and can end up along the banks, out of range of larger fish. Fish may also be more shy about coming to the surface than hitting food as it sinks. Sinking pellets aren't effected by wind, but if not eaten in a short period it ends up on the bottom where it may not be eaten. This is wasteful and might also effect water quality. These are guesses and I encourage people with more practical knowledge to add comments.
FoodSource baits mimic the feel, taste and scent of natural forage to entice fish to strike and eat it. I assume fish pellets are made to have an attractive scent and flavor, but the hard round pellets are noticeably different than the fishes natural forage. I think that a fish food with the nutrition and flavor of pellets and the texture and shape of FoodSource baits would be popular. Cost is probably the main issue in formulating such a product.
If a FoodSource type feed was designed to sink I would think that the goal would be to make it happen very slowly. Besides shaping it to mimic natural forage you could also consider the "action" it created while dropping through the water. If the feed could be formed to descend in a spiral pattern two things might be accomplished. First, it would lengthen the time it took for the food to reach the bottom. Second it would give the food a more natural action that might be more successful in attracting game fish. Another design that might work would be one that drops like a feather falling through the air.
Something else I haven't seen addressed in pellet food is color. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen brightly colored feed. This is interesting considering the extreme amount of attention that color is given in fishing lures. At one time I was training a small group of Warmouth to take pellets and it wasn't happening very quickly at all. They would come to the surface to take live food but they rarely ate the pellets. One day I threw in some fluorescent soft baits and they hammered it immediately.
Color/shape/texture, wouldn't be an issue once fish are conditioned to take feed, but it may make training them easier. Once pond owners see fish regularly taking feed they might assume that all or most of the fish population has been feed trained, but maybe that isn't always the case. Perhaps a significant percentage of their fish don't ever become conditioned to the pellets. If that's the case then a FoodSource type feed might have a niche. As I mentioned above, cost would seem to be the limiting factor.
