Reports

Vet services inflation is running 5× faster than pet food inflation. That gap explains why some pet categories are resilient and others are breaking — and it's visible before earnings tell you.

We tracked 50 confirmed pet industry transactions over 12 months. Six repeat acquirers executed more than a third of them — and the pattern they're forming tells you exactly where the moat is moving.

The Clean Label Project tested 79 dog foods for heavy metals and contaminants. The headlines focused on which formats were worst. We asked a different question: what happens when you map those results against the specific FDA action levels that define safety for human food? Consider that the allowable lead in pet food is 1,000 times higher than what the FDA now permits in baby food. The gap between those two worlds isn't a rounding error. It's a multiplier — and it applies to every major contaminant with a federal benchmark.

59% of American dogs are overweight. The technology to measure it precisely exists — and nobody's offering it. We sized the market, modeled the unit economics, and ranked seven metros for launch. Break-even: 4 scans per day.

One in six American pets lacks both veterinary access and insurance coverage. This analysis maps the overlap — and sizes the opportunity for insurers, care providers, and investors willing to build outside metro cores.

The humanization trend has a price tag. In San Francisco — where dogs outnumber children 2:1 — pet owners now pay more for dog daycare than the average American family pays for childcare. Seattle and NYC are 18-24 months behind.

PetSmart and Petco followed population into Houston, Phoenix, and Atlanta. Groomers and boarders didn't. We built a Service Gap Index comparing retail density to service density by metro — and found a 2.8× imbalance in Houston alone. That's $287M in annual revenue waiting for whoever fills it.

French Bulldogs pay 11% higher premiums but generate 340% higher claims costs. We built the Breed Risk Index by blending AKC registration data, Nationwide's brachycephalic study, and Royal Veterinary College health prevalence rates. The result: a 4.4× risk concentration most underwriters aren't accounting for.