India Will Have 43 Million Pet Dogs Next Year. Most of Them Still Won’t Eat Proper Pet Food.

By Dr. Anshul Rawal, Veterinarian

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A patient once asked me a question I have never fully stopped thinking about.

She had two indie dogs, both rescued, both adored. She had done her reading. She knew what a decent diet looked like. And she asked, without any edge in her voice: “Doctor, I understand what you are saying. But I cannot spend this much on food every month. What do I do instead?”

I did not have a good answer for her at the time. The honest one — feed what you can afford and accept the tradeoff — felt like a failure of the profession rather than advice.

That conversation is, in miniature, the central problem in Indian pet nutrition. It is not an awareness problem. It is an economics problem wearing an awareness problem’s clothes.

The numbers behind the anecdote

India is on track to have roughly 43 million pet dogs by 2026. The pet food market is valued somewhere around $1 billion depending on whose methodology you accept, growing at 10–12% a year, with premium segments growing considerably faster.

Now the number that actually matters: only about 10% of Indian pet owners feed packaged food exclusively. Daily commercial diets reach somewhere around 29% of the owned-dog population.

Read those two figures together and the picture is uncomfortable. A category growing at double digits, and a majority of pets still eating household leftovers, biscuits, plain rice, or an improvised mix that nobody has ever run the numbers on.

The industry has been reading this as untapped opportunity. I think that is the wrong read. It is a pricing failure, and pricing failures in food become health outcomes.

Why the good stuff costs what it costs

When a premium pet food in India carries a price that makes a middle-class household hesitate, the cost is rarely sitting in the ingredients. It accumulates elsewhere.

Imported finished product. A significant share of premium pet food sold here is manufactured abroad and shipped in, arriving with freight, duties and importer margin already stacked on before it reaches a shelf.

Outsourced formulation. Many domestic brands license or adapt third-party recipes rather than developing their own. You are paying for someone else’s R&D, amortised into your bag.

Contract manufacturing without control. Brands that own neither the recipe nor the plant have limited leverage over input cost or quality, and both problems land on the consumer.

Marketing-heavy category economics. In a market where trust is scarce and differentiation is hard, acquisition spend is enormous — and it is priced in.

None of this is scandalous. It is just how a young category behaves before it matures. The consequence, though, is a two-tier market: excellent nutrition for households that can absorb the cost, and a fallback to whatever is in the kitchen for everyone else.

Why the fallback is not neutral

I want to be precise here, because “home food is bad” is a claim I do not accept and would not make.

Home-cooked food for pets is not inherently inferior. Formulated properly, it can be excellent. The problem is that it is almost never formulated. Diets built by affection rather than calculation reliably run short on calcium relative to phosphorus — which matters most in growing animals — and cats fed unsupplemented home meals risk taurine deficiency affecting cardiac and retinal health.

These deficiencies are slow and quiet. They do not show up as a crisis. They show up as a dog that was never quite as robust as it should have been, and nobody connects it to a bowl.

What actually closes the gap

Three things, and only one of them is the consumer’s job.

Domestic formulation and manufacturing. Every step of the supply chain that stays in India removes a layer of cost that was never about nutrition. This is the single largest lever available, and it is one the industry controls, not the buyer.

Format honesty. Shelf-stable wet food produced through retort processing — thermal sterilisation in sealed packaging — holds without chemical preservatives. It is not a marketing innovation; it is standard food technology, and it is available to anyone willing to invest in it.

Radical label transparency. If a brand cannot state plainly what is in the product and where it was made, the consumer has no basis for judging whether a price is fair. Opacity is what allows cost and quality to decouple.

For pet parents reading this: the useful question is not “which is the best brand.” It is “what am I actually paying for.” Ask where the food was made, who formulated it, and what preserves it. The answers are often more revealing than the price.

My client deserved a better answer than the one I gave her. Most pet parents in India still deserve one.

Dr. Anshul Rawal is a veterinarian and the founder of Pawpeye, an Indian pet nutrition company building vet-formulated, preservative-free meals for dogs and cats through in-house R&D and domestic manufacturing.