There is a respectable distance between a red wax wheel of cheese and a bowl of cat food. Dan Waters has spent much of his career making that distance look smaller. The products change. The shopper's anxiety does not. What is in this? Why should I believe the package? Will the thing I trust still feel trustworthy once it is sold everywhere? Those are grocery-aisle questions, and Waters has learned to hear them in several dialects.
In August 2026, Waters became chief executive of I and love and you, the Boulder-born pet-food company with the name of an indie song and the distribution of a national consumer brand. His remit includes Made by Nacho, the culinary cat-food business co-founded by Bobby Flay that I and love and you acquired earlier in the year. The combined portfolio reaches more than 30,000 retail doors, and the company says annual retail sales have passed $100 million.
This is the sort of appointment that can be summarized as a leap into a new category. That misses the more interesting continuity. Waters comes from Hu, the chocolate brand, and before that led Enjoy Life Foods. Earlier still, he worked on Babybel, The Laughing Cow and other Bel names across America and Europe. His résumé is a long study of compact objects carrying complicated promises.
A finance mind learns the shelf
Waters did not begin as the mascot of anything edible. He earned a finance degree from Miami University in 1997, then an MBA in strategy and marketing from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management in 2003. His early career crossed Deloitte, Gap and Clorox, giving him time in finance, operations and consumer business before he settled into the language of brands.
That sequence matters. Marketing can become theatre when separated from the machinery beneath it. Finance can become arithmetic when it forgets the shopper. Waters accumulated both points of view, then took them to Barilla, where he led the pasta-sauce business and the Wasa crispbread brand. He also launched a beverage startup, a detour that exposed the industry from the less upholstered side of the conference table.
By 2013 he was talking publicly about Mini Babybel's mischievous character and how a brand could come alive across television and social channels. The red wax did much of the visual work, but the task was broader: make a small snack recognizable, legible and useful to a family. He rose from American marketing leadership to a transatlantic role at Bel, overseeing strategy, communication and innovation for Babybel, The Laughing Cow, Boursin, Leerdammer and Kiri across Europe and the Americas.
For two years, the job took Waters and his family to Paris. Returning to the Chicago area meant bringing home more than a fondness for a well-run cheese counter. He had seen how global brands must keep a recognizable center while adapting to the habits of different markets. It is the same problem, scaled down, that faces a portfolio with two pet-food names and many retail channels.
The label becomes the argument
At Enjoy Life Foods and later Hu, the package had to work harder. Shoppers did not merely want flavor. They wanted to understand ingredients, manufacturing choices and sourcing standards without taking a seminar beside the shelf. Waters's public comments during these years kept returning to trust and transparency, words that are common in corporate speech but expensive in practice.
At a Fairtrade cocoa forum, he offered a compact explanation of the difference between a brand visit and a lasting system: “Hu can show up for one week, but Fairtrade is there for 52.” It is a good operator's sentence. A campaign happens for a week. Procurement happens all year. The line also reveals his instinct to turn an abstract commitment into a calendar anyone can picture.
“Hu can show up for one week, but Fairtrade is there for 52.”Dan Waters, on durable producer relationships
Waters also described certification as a way to make commitments visible, saying that a recognized mark could affirm standards and give customers a reliable signal. The insight travels well. A consumer cannot inspect a supply chain from the supermarket. A brand must convert invisible routines into evidence that fits on a wrapper.
That is where the finance graduate, marketer and operator converge. The promise has to survive a budget. The packaging has to make sense in seconds. The supply chain has to do on the 52nd week what the campaign said in the first. Waters's career has gradually moved him closer to products for which that alignment is the whole proposition.
Two brands enter the same kitchen
I and love and you acquired Made by Nacho in March 2026. Each kept its own identity. Bobby Flay became chief culinary officer, investor and board member across the combined business. Five months later, Waters arrived to lead the portfolio, succeeding Michael Meyer, who moved to the chairman's seat.
The timing makes his job clear. This is a company after a transaction, above a meaningful sales threshold and spread across natural grocers, mass retailers, pet specialists and ecommerce. The temptation in such moments is to make everything match. Yet portfolio efficiency and brand sameness are not synonyms. Cat owners who choose a chef-led label may be responding to different cues from the shopper drawn to I and love and you's candid, ingredient-forward voice.
Names, voices, recipes and the small signals that let shoppers know which brand they are holding.
Distribution, sourcing discipline, operational systems and the reach needed to place both brands in more baskets.
Waters has framed the opportunity most sharply around cats. Premium choices, he has argued, have not caught up with the devotion people bring to their cats, even though the category accounts for more than half of the combined business. His stated aim is to provide more options and variety nationwide. Underneath the sentiment sits a portfolio thesis: cat food is large enough to deserve more culinary imagination and fragmented enough to reward a clear point of view.
His connection to Bobby Flay adds a useful division of labor. Flay can make taste and culinary craft tangible. Waters can make the business repeatable. One gives the bowl a voice; the other has to ensure it arrives at the right store, with the right label, at a price the business can sustain.
“The I and love and you team saw the clean-label pet-food shift coming years before the rest of the category did.”Dan Waters, on joining the company in 2026
A board table close to home
There is another line on Waters's public biography that resists the tidy consumer-brand arc. He serves on the Winnetka Public Schools District 36 board, where he is listed as vice-president and where his current term runs through 2029. Corporate profiles are fond of saying executives care about community. School-board minutes are a sterner medium. They involve public accountability, constrained resources and stakeholders who quite reasonably refuse to behave like market segments.
The role places the global executive inside a local institution. It also returns him to first principles: what is the strategy, who does it serve, and can the people responsible actually execute it? Those questions apply differently in a school district and a consumer company, but neither setting permits a slogan to do the work of a system.
That may be the most useful way to understand Waters. He is less a serial category hopper than a translator between functions and constituencies. Finance, brand, operations. Producers, retailers, shoppers. A Boulder headquarters, a Chicago-area home base, a Paris chapter and a Lima cocoa forum. His career keeps placing distance between the people who make a promise and the people asked to believe it. His work is to shorten the distance.
The promise has four paws
Pet food adds one comic complication to consumer marketing: the eater cannot read. The person buying the product must interpret quality on someone else's behalf, while the final judge may express a verdict by walking away from the bowl. It makes clarity more important and pretension less useful.
Waters now has to turn a clean-label position, a recent acquisition and a large national footprint into routines that work every week. He must protect two voices, widen choice for cat owners and translate premium ingredients into products that survive the mundane tests of availability and value. None of that will be solved by a single advertisement.
The red wax, the chocolate bar and the pet bowl have taught versions of the same lesson. Trust is built in public but maintained backstage. A shopper sees the package for a few seconds. The company has to keep the promise for 52 weeks. Waters has arrived at the bowl with a career's worth of practice.