One of the Pandemic's Most Unlikely Offshoots Is High-Quality Dog Food Brands

Tory and Michael Waxman are the kind of professional power couple that you might read about in The New York Times and be suitably envious of. She is a successful veterinarian with degrees from Cornell and University of Pennsylvania. He is a Yale-bred software engineer whose enterprises include Grouper, the dating app funded by Y Combinator. As one might expect, the Waxmans work insane hours. Hours that historically haven't allowed them much time for Mabel and Schuyler—their dogs. In fact, there was just one day each week that the Waxmans weren’t running off to work and had some semblance of downtime. “We’d wake up on Sunday mornings and our dogs knew what day it was,” Michael Waxman said, “because we’d spend the whole day with them.” So when the Waxmans were ready to bring their collaborative venture to the market—the first “human-grade” dog food to come in a box—a brand name was one thing they didn’t have to sweat over too much. They called it Sundays for Dogs. And while it’s obviously a brand meant for man's best friend, it’s also a brand for the times where the family pet, as a companion and stress-reliever, is more important than ever. “In this weird moment when days of the week have taken on new meaning,” Waxman said, “we think that [the name] is the core emotional piece of the brand that we’re really trying to evoke.” Sundays for Dogs is launching today, and though the Waxmans’ years of research and development would probably have resulted in a drop date around now anyway, their brand is part of a larger trend caused by the pandemic. Despite the fact that consumer spending is down by 35% in Q2 and unemployment hovers around 10%, direct-to-consumer upmarket dog food brands are having a moment. The Farmer's Dog ships USDA-grade food directly to customers, who keep the meals in the fridge under serving time. Tailored, a personalized DTC dog food, launched on May 19. After making its debut in March, Hungry Bark, another personalized dog chow upstart, secured a $2.1 million funding round in July. Meanwhile, even more established artisanal dog food brand The Farmer’s Dog, founded in 2015, has seen a 100% month-over-month increase in subscriptions since the pandemic began and a revenue spike of 400% from this time last year. In February, the American Pet Products Association announced that spending on pet-related goods and services had hit $95.7 billion, with food making up the biggest chunk of that spending. “Consumers are more educated than ever about the ingredients that go into their pets’ food, which means they’re willing to pay more for quality products,” CEO Steve King said in a statement. “As the demand for natural, minimally processed ingredients continues, we expect to see steady growth in this category.” But the larger reason why artisanal dog food brands are finding traction right now has less to do with consumer sophistication and everything to do with consumer emotion. In simplest terms, the pandemic hasn’t just sent Americans stampeding to get dogs; it’s made existing dog owners value their dogs more. Americans tend to spoil those they love, which probably explains why owners (well, those who are still employed and can afford it) are willing to pass over that $12 18-pound bag of Purina puppy chow in favor of a DTC service like The Farmer’s Dog, whose fare begins at $2 a day. “Mom, can we get a dog?” America was already pooch country before the novel coronavirus, with a whopping 63 million households including a dog. But in the weeks and months since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic in mid-March, millions of other Americans who didn’t have a dog began to think about getting one. According to a survey of 1,008 adults conducted by TD Ameritrade in April and May, one in three have considered getting a pet. And, indeed, quite a few of us did. In New York and Los Angeles alone, the ASPCA saw a 70% increase in adoptions in April of 2020 over the same period last year. As a result, millions of new dog owners are hitting the pet food market for the first time, many looking to do better than buying a grocery store mainstay brand. “There’s been this huge explosion of adoption and people getting new dogs now,” Waxman said. “When the shelters cleared out in March, you had this huge influx of new dog parents trying to figure out for the first time what to feed their dogs.” Farmer's Dog meal plans are tailored to each dog base on a profile that the owner creates. Waxman sunk a lot of time into making sure Sundays for Dogs offers those new dog parents a reason to choose his band. The brand is made from 90% fresh meat and has no chemical additives. But unlike other nutritional pet foods that require some degree of refrigeration or preparation, Sundays for Dogs comes in a cereal box that owners can open and serve. “This is something that looks and smells like quality human food,” Waxman said. “Yet it has this convenience element to it where it comes in a box. You pour it and you’re done.” No need to fetch this food Since they offer varying levels of customized fare, upstarts like Hungry Bark and Tailored sell to the public on a DTC basis, and that model is another reason why the pandemic has furnished unexpected opportunity. If there’s a time to launch a delivery-based business, it’s now. As Americans have stayed behind their doors, services that bring needed goods to them have boomed. Grocery apps were recording triple-digit growth in June, and DoorDash’s valuation hit $16 billion. Along the way, something else happened. Consumers who might have only had a pizza delivered in former times suddenly got used to ordering delivery for everything else. And that, said Eric Tsytsylin, head of brand for The Farmer's Dog, has come to include dog food. Three-month-old Tailored offers personalized meals that arrived in craft paper packaging and include the dog's name. “Certainly, there’s an openness to delivery, to buying things online that you may have previously been going to the store to get,” he said. The Farmer’s Dog ships fresh, USDA ingredients that veterinary nutritionists develop directly to customers' doors. Since the food is fresh and has to be refrigerated, it’s just not the kind of stuff that shoppers could buy in bulk at the big-box store. “I’m not sure our product could exist without being a subscription service,” Tsytsylin said. “That’s what allows us to make a fresh, preservative-free product and deliver it to people in a short window.” Fido achieves family member status The overriding reason for the growth of upscale foods for dogs is evidently more sentimental than anything else. This protracted period during which millions of people are working from home has led to an unprecedented level of human and pet bonding. And as dogs have increasingly become full-fledged members of the family, it follows that Rover’s chowtime will undergo a commensurate elevation to human standards. “During these uncertain times, pets provide invaluable comfort, emotional support and companionship to all of us," Tailored CEO Steve Joyce said in a statement that accompanied the brand’s May launch. “As we all spend more time than ever at home with our pets and limit our trips to the store, Tailored is here to help make consumers' lives easier and their pets' lives better by providing them with the best nutrition for their furry family members.” Tailored, whose “personalized” dog food is based on the results of a questionnaire that owners fill out about a dog’s health and preferences, has homed in on consumer sentiments that are wholly genuine. Sundays for Dogs' Michael Waxman posits that if two-thirds of people sleep with their dogs, they'll pop for better food for them, too. Earlier this month, a survey of 3,000 pet parents conducted by Mira-Pet found that Americans are bonding with their cats and dogs at rates never seen before. A whopping 73% reported that having a pet helped them stay sane during lockdown. A little over a quarter of dog owners said they feared their pooches would suffer separation anxiety when the work from home era ends. Perhaps most surprising was that 38% said they’d take a pay cut if that allowed them to continue working from home solely so they could stay with their pets. Since so many dogs are now enjoying elevated status in the household, it’s not much of a stretch to assume that their owners will want to increase the quality of the food going into their bowls. “Those who have dogs are spending more time with them,” said Tsytsylin, “which could increase consciousness of how you’re caring for that pet and the decisions you’re making on their behalf.” Working on the launch of Sundays for Dogs, Waxman was well aware of this dynamic, too. “There’s been this big cultural shift into viewing dogs as family members,” he said. “Today, two out of three people report that their dogs sleep in bed with them. Modern dog parents are evaluating their brands and products through this lens of what’s good enough for an animal I’m treating as a family member.” Waxman believes that Sundays for Dogs is good enough, pointing to the 5,000 customers who’ve been on the waiting list for today’s launch. And just in case that’s not enough of an incentive, he’s got something else: The brand conducted a blind taste test with 20 dogs, which sampled Sundays for Dogs against the “the ‘best-tasting’ super premium kibble” on two separate rounds. Sundays came out on top, 40-to-nothing, though none of the participating dogs was available for comment.