From 12 Boxes a Week to 200 Million Meals Served

Before co-founding Spot & Tango, Dylan Munro was studying high-growth consumer brands at McKinsey, analyzing what separated great businesses from merely good ones. That experience gave him a front-row seat to what separates great businesses from merely good ones and helped shape the blueprint for what Spot & Tango would become.

Eight years later, Spot & Tango has grown into a profitable business generating an estimated $120–130 million in annual revenue, growing 60–70% year-over-year with roughly 95% of sales coming through subscriptions. The company has invested tens of millions of dollars into building its own manufacturing capabilities, recently committing another $20 million to expand its Allentown facility and double production capacity while continuing to avoid traditional retail distribution

In this conversation, Munro explains why most pet food brands are really marketing companies, what it took to build manufacturing capabilities from scratch, how Spot & Tango turned a customer complaint into its flagship product, why frugality remains a core operating principle even after investing tens of millions of dollars, and how AI is beginning to reshape supply chain operations.

While at McKinsey, I was lucky to work both directly with DTC brands and also with investment firms who were deciding whether to invest in or acquire DTC brands. This gave me multiple perspectives into what makes a great ecommerce company across culture, execution, operations, marketing, and financial performance.

So, when I left McKinsey to co-found Spot & Tango, I knew what “good” looked like, and I’ve strived to build Spot & Tango into that kind of business. The key is to first build a product that is truly differentiated and that people love, and then build on that product-market fit to quickly prove that the unit economics — customer acquisition cost compared to the lifetime value of a customer — can work at scale.

Ultimately, by following these principles, we have been able to build a scaled, profitable business growing 60-70% year-over-year, and have made hundreds of thousands of dogs happier + healthier along the way.

In order to continue supporting the growing demand for our primary product, UnKibble, we had to find a way to increase production capacity. Most DTC brands (including in the pet food space) rely on 3rd-party manufacturers to scale supply, but because UnKibble is such a unique product, there isn’t enough 3rd-party capacity in the US to support our demand. Therefore, we had to expand!

In terms of what it takes - it’s easy to say we are doubling capacity over the next year or two, but it’s another thing to actually pull that off. There is an incredible amount of work going on across every function in our company. Our teams in operations, logistics, warehousing, production, quality assurance, maintenance, and supply chain are all working together to make this vision a reality.

This includes ordering millions of dollars of equipment, ensuring we have all the utilities (electric, water, etc.) to support that equipment, moving thousands of pallets and tons of steel racking, hiring dozens of employees, scheduling multiple shifts, and much, much more.