The Farmer's Dog Buys Beyond the Bowl, Betting on One of Pet's Fastest Growers

A billion-dollar fresh food subscription just bought a second recurring purchase. The Farmer's Dog has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Woof, the Denver-based enrichment and wellness brand behind the Pupsicle treat-dispensing toy, in a deal expected to close later this year. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Farmer's Dog agrees to acquire wellness brand Woof

The Farmer's Dog announced the acquisition on August 6th, its first move outside nutrition since launching in 2014. Woof, founded in 2019 by chief executive Daniel Haarburger, makes the Pupsicle enrichment toy along with Refill Pops, Wellness Pops, and the HonestChew line of dental chews.

The company has raised just $1.69 million, a single seed round from Kokopelli Capital in February 2023, per PitchBook. On that base, Woof ranked No. 3 nationwide and No. 1 in Consumer Products on the 2025 Inc. 5000, Inc.'s annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, reporting three-year revenue growth of more than 25,000%.

BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan provided committed financing for the deal. Latham & Watkins represented The Farmer's Dog and Paul Hastings represented Woof.

"Nutrition is the foundation of a long, healthy life, but enrichment and play are also essential," said Jonathan Regev, chief executive and co-founder of The Farmer's Dog. Haarburger called it a chance to "set an even higher bar for the pet industry." Woof will continue operating as an independent division after the deal closes, according to the release.

The deal is as much a growth bet as a retention play

Woof isn't just insurance against subscriber churn. It ranked No. 3 nationwide and No. 1 in Consumer Products on the 2025 Inc. 5000, posting three-year revenue growth of more than 25,000% off a single $1.69 million seed round. That trajectory has value on its own, separate from whatever it does for The Farmer's Dog's subscriber retention math, and it's the more likely reason a company with no acquisition history moved on Woof specifically rather than a slower-growing enrichment brand.

The retention logic still matters. The Farmer's Dog built a reported $1.2 billion in annualized revenue almost entirely on one recurring purchase: a personalized meal subscription. That is a powerful, sticky product, but it is also a single point of failure, since a subscriber who cancels the food plan cancels the entire relationship. Woof gives The Farmer's Dog a second and third product line to bundle into that subscription, and a genuine foothold in pet enrichment, a category the company has never touched in eleven years of operating.

It is the same logic behind TAW Ventures' acquisition of Polkadog earlier this year, where a single owner started stacking wellness-adjacent brands under one roof rather than betting on any single category. The difference here is that the acquirer isn't a holding company assembling a portfolio from the outside. It's an operating DTC brand pulling a second product line directly into its own subscription funnel, where Woof's existing retail relationships with PetSmart, Amazon, Chewy, and 6,000-plus independent stores through Pet Food Experts become upside rather than overlap.

The deal also fits a pattern The Farmer's Dog has been running for over a year. The company expanded onto Walmart.com in its first retail move, then signed a two-year content partnership with The Oprah Podcast to defend its category lead against newer entrants. Buying Woof is the same instinct applied to product line instead of distribution or marketing: widen the platform before a competitor, or an eventual public market, forces the question of what The Farmer's Dog actually is beyond a meal plan.

The pace of the category backs that up. Capstone Partners counted 18 announced or completed pet-sector M&A deals in the first four months of 2026 alone, more than double the eight tracked in the same stretch of 2025, according to the firm's pet sector update. That was before this deal, and before Agrolimen's acquisition of Ollie for more than $600 million in February. A fresh-food category consolidating at that pace is expanding through acquisition faster than most of its players are expanding organically.

Whether Woof stays on store shelves after the deal

The clearest signal to watch is distribution. Woof's products sit on shelves at PetSmart and inside 6,000-plus independent pet stores, channels The Farmer's Dog has never sold through directly. If Woof keeps stocking those shelves under its own name, The Farmer's Dog just bought a retail toehold without building one. If the toy and chew lines get pulled behind The Farmer's Dog's login and folded into subscription-only bundles, the deal was about basket size and retention, not channel diversification.

The fridge question: The Farmer's Dog's Walmart.com launch in April runs the same quiz-to-subscription flow as its own site, and the company still hasn't announced in-store placement or the refrigerated infrastructure that move would require, unlike Freshpet's grocery-aisle model. Read next to a first acquisition that pulls Woof's PetSmart and 6,000-plus independent-store relationships in-house, the online-only Walmart funnel increasingly looks like market testing ahead of a physical shelf push, not a permanent channel on its own.

Also worth tracking: whether Woof's products start appearing as add-ons inside The Farmer's Dog's meal-plan checkout flow, the clearest evidence the combined company is optimizing for subscriber lifetime value rather than running two separate businesses. Woof turned a single $1.69 million seed round into an acquisition by a company with $268 million in venture funding behind it, and that kind of capital efficiency tends to get noticed. Expect other well-capitalized DTC pet brands to start shopping the same adjacent categories before the next fast-growing, thinly-funded wellness brand gets bought first.

Source: The Farmer's Dog Acquires Woof, Extending Its Reach Beyond the Bowl via PR Newswire