- Open up to 20 accounts for payroll, rent, taxes, and more, giving every dollar a job before you spend it.
- Upload, approve, and pay bills automatically, so nothing slips through the cracks.
- Assign cards with built-in spend limits, empowering your team without losing control.
- Connect with your accounting tools for cleaner books and faster month-end closes.
- Track every dollar in real time.
— Eric, Trustpilot
🧫 Cultivated pet food just landed its first real shelf
💰 The Hims co-founder just raised $37M for a fresh dog food brand
🏃♂ "Running With Dogs" documentary coming summer 2026. Canicross is small but the gear, nutrition, and fitness spending around it is real.
👌 Petco added two DTC wellness brands in 72 hours
⚽ Adidas is selling FIFA World Cup jerseys for dogs in six markets starting May 1
🫥 Over half of Asheville's vet clinics are now corporate-owned and PE firms are still calling the independents daily
In May 2025, a Fort Collins, Colorado couple who had built one of the largest raw-feeding audiences on social media told their followers they had been wrong about almost everything.
Bryce and Kenzie Francois ran The BK Pets, an audience of roughly 2.7M across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
They had written a book on holistic raw feeding.
For years they had argued that conventional kibble was poisoning dogs. Then they sat down with board-certified veterinary nutritionists, listened, and recanted publicly.
What came next is the move to focus on. The Francoises did not launch another raw brand.
They did not pivot to kibble. They built Fairbowl, a brand-grading platform that ranks pet foods on veterinary nutrition criteria and accepts no money from the brands it grades.
Fairbowl also sells vet-formulated homemade recipes alongside the rankings, which gives the operation commercial skin in the same category it evaluates.
Its homepage describes Bryce as someone who built an audience of 2.7M on dog nutrition advice he "later realized was wrong."
The most successful raw influencer in the country looked at the category and concluded that part of the answer was the evaluation layer that did not exist.
Pet is a $158B industry. APPA's 2026 State of the Industry Report puts 2025 spending at $158B, up 3.7% from 2024, with $165B projected in 2026.
Pet food and treats specifically came in at $68.3B in 2025, up 3% from $66B in 2024, representing 43.2% of total pet industry sales.
Research presented by Mintel at the 2024 Pet Food Conference found that from 2019 to 2023, roughly one-third of all pet food product introductions came from new companies and brands, a churn rate Mintel's Lynn Dornblaser noted is significantly higher than human food.
Mintel's 2025 US Pet Food Market Report shows the volume of functional health, ethical, and clean label claims on launches has continued to climb across the same window.
What hasn't kept pace with the growth is the infrastructure for evaluating it.
There is no independent, consumer-facing body in pet that tests products against the criteria consumers and veterinarians say they care about.
The category has the brands, the marketing claims, the supplements, the formats, and the price points. What it doesn't have is the layer that helps anyone tell them apart.
"De-influencing myself"
Last week, an r/DogFood user posted under that title.
Their puppy had been weaned onto raw food by the breeder and ended up with salmonella at seven months old.
The owner switched to a fresh subscription brand, then to several proteins as digestive issues continued, then to a hydrolyzed diet, and eventually settled on Hill's Gastrointestinal Biome.
The post collected 177 upvotes and 75 comments.
The owner described the experience as needing to un-radicalize themselves from the marketing they had been hearing for years.
A separate r/DogFood thread from the same week, titled "What dog food is good," tracked a similar arc.
The owner had two ten-month-old Aussies who had been sick on Hill's puppy formula, Purina lamb, Purina One beef, Open Farm beef, and Open Farm Good Gut.
Their first vet had prescribed Hill's W/D, which the dogs reacted poorly to. A new vet declined to recommend a food at all.
The owner asked the subreddit how to navigate "half the internet" telling them to feed only WSAVA-compliant brands and the other half calling those brands trash.
The subreddit reports approximately 62,000 weekly visitors.
The pattern in the comments is consistent across threads.
A consumer pays a premium for a brand they were told was healthier.
Something goes wrong, or the dog reacts poorly, or the vet refers them somewhere else. They turn to the community for guidance.
The community converges on the same five brand names that have been the standard recommendation for decades.
Then someone in the thread questions whether the vets pushing those brands are getting paid to recommend them.
There is no independent third party anyone can defer to.
WSAVA does not certify brands
The "five WSAVA brands" cited in nearly every veterinarian recommendation conversation (Hill's Science Diet, Purina Pro Plan, Royal Canin, Iams, and Eukanuba) are a community shorthand.
WSAVA itself does not endorse, certify, or maintain a list.
Its Global Nutrition Guidelines exist as a question-based toolkit for evaluating manufacturers. Each brand interprets and self-reports its alignment.
There is no audit.
The criteria themselves are real and demanding.
They include a full-time qualified nutritionist on staff (preferably board-certified through ACVIM), AAFCO feeding trials of at least 26 weeks, owned and operated manufacturing, peer-reviewed research output, and rigorous ingredient quality control.
A small set of fresh-food brands, including Freshpet, The Farmer's Dog, and JustFoodForDogs, now publish their alignment with WSAVA criteria on their own websites.
That self-reporting is where things get debated.
Critics inside the pet nutrition community argue that brands meeting some but not all of the criteria, or self-reporting alignment without third-party verification, are leveraging the WSAVA name without earning the underlying scrutiny.
The Farmer's Dog became a WSAVA Diamond Partner in January 2024, the organization's first fresh-food company partner.
The partnership supports WSAVA's professional wellness and non-clinical working groups rather than the nutrition guidelines themselves.
Whether that proximity to WSAVA strengthens the brand's nutrition credibility or muddies the line between sponsorship and endorsement depends on whom you ask.
The sister regulator everyone invokes is AAFCO, the Association of American Feed Control Officials.
AAFCO is constantly cited as if it certifies pet food.
Its own consumer page states it "does not regulate, test, approve or certify pet food."
AAFCO sets model code. The FDA enforces. The states inspect.
None of them evaluates whether a food does what its marketing says.
The result is a market with no independent, consumer-facing layer between marketing claims and consumer trust.
Brands that meet the WSAVA criteria get the vet's recommendation because no other framework exists.
The hundreds of brands that do not meet the criteria, including many that are seriously trying, exist in unevaluated territory.
Fewer than 100 people for $68B in pet food
The scale of the credential pool is the next part of the story.
Fewer than 100 board-certified veterinary nutritionists are credentialed in the United States through the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine's Nutrition specialty.
The full ACVIM roster across all six specialties (cardiology, internal medicine for both small and large animals, neurology, oncology, and nutrition) is more than 3,800 active Diplomates. Nutrition is the smallest specialty.
The pipeline shows no sign of catching up.
ACVIM's 2025 impact report records just five new Nutrition Candidates that year and six specialty exam takers.
These are the credentialed scientific voices for a market that adds hundreds of new SKUs each year.
The Farmer's Dog has publicly noted that four of the country's roughly 100 board-certified nutritionists work at the brand.
The general practice veterinarian is the next line of defense, and is not better resourced.
The number of USDA-designated veterinary shortage areas hit a record 243 in 2025, up from 217 in 2020.
Companion animal veterinary visits declined 2.3% in 2024, continuing a multi-year softening that has nothing to do with pet ownership numbers.
The average vet appointment runs eight to twelve minutes. T
he veterinarian is not gatekeeping the brands they recommend. They are triaging an information problem with no infrastructure behind it.
So they default.
When influencers become auditors
In the absence of an institutional layer, the market is building one anyway. Most of it is stitched together from things that were not designed to do this job.
Fairbowl is one example.
Its grading rubric is published, its model takes no money from the brands it grades, and its in-house veterinary nutritionist Dr. Danielle Conway is named directly on the site.
Fairbowl also sells the vet-formulated homemade recipes Conway develops, which is its own version of the skin-in-the-game pattern the rest of the category runs into.
Other partial answers exist.
Chewy is rolling out AI-driven product matching and pet profile tools that effectively become a curation layer.
The Dog Aging Project, anchored at the University of Washington and Texas A&M with a $7M NIH grant in late 2024, has enrolled more than 50,000 dogs and is publishing peer-reviewed work on canine aging at academic scale.
Wearables like Whistle, Fi, and FitBark are positioning themselves as the longitudinal data layer that will eventually inform feeding decisions.
The National Animal Supplement Council (NASC) has built a real certification model for pet supplements, but it does not cover food.
None of these is an independent, consumer-facing certification body for pet food. Each is a partial answer that exists because the full answer does not.
Studies as press releases
The partial answers run into a wall the moment they try to settle anything contested. Three recent episodes show the wall clearly.
In February 2026, the Clean Label Project published its dog food category report, testing 79 top-selling products.
The findings made national news. Dry dog food contained heavy metals at three to thirteen times the levels found in human food, with one product testing at acrylamide concentrations Cornell veterinary nutritionist Dr. Joseph Wakshlag told CNN he had never seen in any food before.
Freshpet became the first brand certified across its entire product line the same week.
The Pet Food Institute issued a statement the day of release, arguing the study lacked sampling methodology and failed to account for moisture differences when comparing fresh and dry foods.
Trade press picked up the methodology critique and added another.
CLP relies on a single laboratory, skips peer review, and offers paid certification to brands, including some it tests.
The same dynamic, in reverse, played out three months earlier.
In October 2025, The Farmer's Dog published a metabolomic study in Metabolites comparing fresh food to extruded kibble in 22 senior dogs, conducted with Cornell researchers and the brand's own board-certified nutritionists.
The conclusion was that fresh food supports healthier metabolic aging.
In December, BSM Partners published a detailed challenge.
The fresh and kibble diets had different macronutrient profiles. The study's nutrient table contained calculation errors, including vitamin A reported at ten times the actual formulation level.
Some study dogs received antibiotics during the trial.
BSM Partners advises kibble manufacturers, a fact The Farmer's Dog noted in calling the critique "a biased attempt at discrediting a sound and credible study."
The pushback also surfaces in consumer channels.
Last week, an r/DogFood thread titled "Farmer's Dog Addresses Pancreatitis Claims (And It's Hilarious)" collected 104 upvotes after linking to the brand's Q&A.
The top comment walked through specific methodology objections, including that the brand's comparison to Purina Pro Plan canned food used a sport line built for active dogs.
Every actor in these episodes has financial skin in the conclusion.
CLP needs studies that drive demand for the certification it sells. PFI represents the manufacturers whose products tested worst.
The Farmer's Dog needs evidence to defend premium positioning. BSM advises kibble manufacturers. None is the independent body the category lacks.
What the category is missing
Mature consumer markets eventually develop independent evaluation that consumers actively look for.
USDA Organic on the box of grocery store food. Energy Star on the side of the appliance.
Non-GMO Project Verified on the shelf. Even category-specific marks like the NASC Quality Seal for pet supplements give consumers a single, recognizable signal.
Pet food does not have an equivalent.
The AAFCO statement on the bag is a self-declared assertion of nutritional adequacy, not an independent evaluation of whether a product does what its marketing says it does.
No independent body evaluates pet food on the question consumers and veterinarians actually want answered.
No independent body evaluates pet food on the question consumers and veterinarians actually want answered, which is whether a given diet does what its marketing says it does.
The inputs to build one are now in place.
The Dog Aging Project's 50,000-dog cohort makes distributed real-world evidence trials credible at scale.
AAHA has accredited more than 4,500 veterinary practices in North America, a pre-vetted clinical network.
Wearables collect activity, rest, eating, and behavioral data continuously. AI can synthesize all of it. What the category does not yet have is the founding team and the funding to assemble it.
Capital is still funding brands
The capital signal in pet right now points toward more brands.
After a multi-year wave of corporate consolidation in veterinary practices, the deal pace across the major operators has visibly cooled through 2024-2025.
Most fresh capital is flowing into product brands.
Yesterday, Atomic Labs, the Hims & Hers-affiliated startup studio, launched Golden Child, a new ultra-premium fresh dog food brand co-founded by Quentin Lacornerie (former Hims & Hers VP of product management) and Hilary Coles (Hims & Hers co-founder).
The catalyst was Atomic founder and Hims & Hers co-founder Jack Abraham's own dog becoming sick on a leading fresh food brand, resulting in a $5,000 vet bill (Of 12 fresh and specialty pet food brands launched in the last decade, nearly 60% of them cite a founder's sick dog as the reason the company exists.).
Golden Child raised $37M across seed and Series A from Redpoint Ventures, Atomic, and A*.
Three Hims & Hers co-founders have now built or backed pet companies in the last five years.
Joe Spector left in early 2021 to launch Dutch, the pet telehealth platform.
Abraham is the studio behind Golden Child. Coles is a Golden Child co-founder.
None of these companies is the evaluation infrastructure the category is missing. They are different ways to layer brand and service into a category that has plenty of both.
The category has had its cycle of brand experimentation, its DTC reckoning, and its consolidation wave.
What it has not had is the institutional flowering other consumer markets eventually go through, the moment when an independent evaluator becomes a credential consumers actively look for.
Whether the body looks like a USDA Organic equivalent for pet food, an industry-funded testing consortium with a consumer-facing seal, or something the category invents from scratch, the structural question is the same.
Mature markets develop independent evaluators.
Pet food has not yet.
The technology, the data, and the cohorts to build one finally exist.
Whether anyone independent of the commercial layer steps into that role is the open question.
