pet-food
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Dan Waters and the Business of What Goes in the Bowl
After building brands around cheese, ingredient-conscious snacks and chocolate, Dan Waters has arrived in pet food with a familiar brief: turn a label into a promise people can understand.
Laika took pet shopping online. Then it opened the doors.
The Colombian pet retailer raised $65 million across three funding rounds, built a membership habit and moved into physical stores. Its next test is making that combination pay.
Jaimie Turkington Built a Career Turning Pet-Food Complexity Into Clarity
Long before revenue entered her title, Turkington learned to make complicated products legible. At Petcurean, that skill became the connective tissue between brand, sales, innovation and purpose.
Petcurean Built a $44 Million Pet-Food Business by Treating Kibble Like a Portfolio
The Canadian company does not sell one universal answer to the pet-food aisle. It sells four sharply drawn promises - then makes nutritionists, distributors and recyclable bags carry the weight.
How Pet Valu Turned a $100 Million Warehouse Bet Into an 877-Store Playbook for Neighborhood Retailers
Pet Valu sells the recurring essentials pets cannot postpone, but its real product is local trust at national scale. A four-year logistics overhaul shows how the 50-year-old Canadian chain is trying to make that contradiction pay.
The Pet-Food Company That Turned a Sailor's Biscuit Into a Wellness Portfolio
A Gloucester bakery's hard-tack biscuit became the first crumb in a century-long pet-food story. Today, Wellness Pet Company is betting that premium nutrition, functional formulas and a daily dental chew can all belong in the same bowl.
The Jam Company That Quietly Took Over Your Pantry
Smucker spent 129 years turning a horse-drawn apple-butter route into a $9.1 billion portfolio of coffee, frozen sandwiches, pet food and snack cakes. The wager now is that old brands, sharp distribution and one very modern PB&J can keep growing together.
Nestlé Purina North America
Purina turned a checkerboard feed business into a pet-care system that reaches the grocery aisle, the veterinary clinic and the modern home. Its advantage is less one famous bag than a century of science, factories and brands built for almost every bowl.
Champion Petfoods
Champion Petfoods turned a simple premise - put more recognizable animal ingredients into the bowl - into two global premium brands. Four decades in, the Mars-owned company is betting that the next contest in pet food will be won in the pilot kitchen as much as the pet-store aisle.
Post Consumer Brands
The maker behind Grape-Nuts, PEBBLES and Malt-O-Meal has quietly become something broader: a $4 billion portfolio spanning breakfast, peanut butter, pet food and private label. Its advantage is less one blockbuster product than a shelf-wide system built for both nostalgia and value.
General Mills
It began as one flour mill on the Mississippi in 1866. A century and a half later, General Mills fills roughly nine in ten American pantries - and is betting its next chapter on cereal, snacks and, increasingly, the dog bowl.
Central Garden & Pet
It started as one man's distribution route in 1980. Four decades later, Central Garden & Pet quietly stocks the grass seed, dog chews and bird feed on shelves across America - roughly $3.1 billion worth a year.
Katie Spies
Katie Spies is the founder and CEO of Maev, the direct-to-consumer brand that made human-grade raw food for dogs a subscription. An MIT-trained engineer who quit tech to spend nearly a year as a full-time dog walker, she built Maev after her rescue dog's health turned around on a raw diet. Since launching in 2020 she has shipped millions of meals, raised roughly $19 million in venture funding, and grown the company by wheat-pasting posters across New York before scaling to paid channels.
Jonathan Regev
Jonathan Regev is the co-founder and CEO of The Farmer's Dog, the fresh, human-grade dog food company he started in 2015 with Brett Podolsky after the two met on a Birthright trip to Israel. A former Bain consultant and Rocket Internet entrepreneur-in-residence, Regev spent over a year planning the business before spending a dollar on infrastructure, building a subscription supply chain that ships pre-portioned, vet-formulated meals direct to dogs' doors. Under his leadership the company crossed more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, turned profitable, and won USA Today's Ad Meter with its 2023 Super Bowl debut.
Maev
Maev is an Austin-based direct-to-consumer pet brand making the first human-grade raw food for dogs. Founded by MIT engineer and Harvard MBA Katie Spies after her own dog's health scare, Maev sells frozen raw food, supplement bars, bone broth and freeze-dried treats built on USDA-certified protein, no fillers, and formulas vetted by PhD veterinary nutritionists. The company raised a $10M Series A led by VMG Partners in 2022 and expanded into retail via Chewy.