A ‘Hearty’ addition to the exploding pet food market

I see this a little bit differently, for two reasons. One is that there are very few people who are making the product which is right for the pet. A lot of them are making the product which is right for their P&L. And hence, there is absolutely no consistency in quality. Whereas for us, this has been in the making for several years, so much so that we have set up our own facilities before even selling an ounce of food, to be able to cater and build the right product.

We are sourcing chicken from farms, which are a few kilometres away from the factory, using the finest cut and going through the baking process. We run this facility every day and produce only enough for one to two weeks at a time so that it’s absolutely fresh. The second thing is, today, for anybody to go and scale a business, you need a distribution network. And we have a fairly widespread distribution network of 93 stores, so we can actually influence the parents and showcase to them what we’re doing. In fact, 52 per cent of the products that we sell are Heads Up For Tails branded, and that’s important to us.

We already do cat treats. We are also launching our own cat food in January next year, for which tasting and trials are underway. We want to give it three or four months to see how cats react to our food before we launch it in the market.

I agree with you that the biggest inhibitor today on explosive growth in India is cost.

We are 30 per cent cheaper than their (foreign brands) price. As we scale up, our next endeavour would be to bring this price down further, to 40 per cent lower than their price. And then possibly build another brand in the economy range. We have already started that with fresh food. It’s a brand called NutriWag.

The realistic number of the pet care market is close to ₹7,500 - ₹8,000 crore. I have extrapolated this by speaking to a lot of people and looking at the revenue numbers of various players. Pet food is the largest share of it. It’s about 60 per cent of that.

The rate of growth during Covid was crazy, it grew 40-42 per cent in that one year, but on a normal sustained basis it’s close to about 17 per cent.

China is a very interesting market, because 10 years ago, it didn’t exist. And then it just exploded where it’s a $30 billion market now.

But, in China, the affordability is a lot more than India. So I think we still have to wait a few more years before we see an explosion like that here. But we are ready. It may take two years. It may take four years. But it’ll come.

We work with a lot of influencers. In fact, we work with about 70-80 influencers every month. And this year we would have reached out and worked with north of 600 or 700. That’s the only way we see how to promote not just our product, but also the idea of pet ownership, responsible pet parenting and so on.

We do seminars. We do pet adoptions at our stores. So digital marketing is 75 per cent of our marketing budget and offline marketing is 25 per cent.

70 per cent of our business is through our own stores. We have 93 stores and we’re adding 12 in the next month and a half. We are currently present in 14 cities and in two months from now will be in 16. We’re only three months old in quick commerce, but we’ve seen it grow 100 per cent year-on-year.

The shelf life is a big challenge, but because we produce here and our time to market is literally 24 hours, we don’t waste time. So if you think about a typical pet food company coming from foreign shores, four months of that shelf life is lost in transit. In our case, that is a huge advantage.