Introduction

Pet-parents are looking for healthier & tastier food options for their pets given the rising concerns regarding health & palatability issues associated with commercial dry food (kibble). As of today, parents must make the hard choice between convenience vs healthy in form of kibble and home cooked food respectively. This task is further complicated since pets cannot speak for themselves and parents must do in-depth research for finding the right diet. Failure to do so results in parents switching food options in a 3 months interval. Overall, finding and sticking to the correct diet for pets is a complex and tedious task.

Healthy Barks aims to help pets lead a healthier & longer life by providing high quality food options while simplifying the end to end feeding process for parents. Healthy Barks leverages leading nutrition science in recipe design for ensuring complete & balanced nutrition and all recipes are tested extensively for taste and safety. The food is prepared in-house, pre-portioned, blast frozen for freshness and finally delivered to customer’s doorsteps in weekly batches.

Pet-parents looking for healthier and tastier food options can either buy directly from the website our connect with our nutrition experts for understanding their pet’s unique dietary needs. Parents can choose from amongst our 9 subscription plans as per their needs and have free access to our pet-expert team for any food related issue.

Where it all started

In Jan 2020, founders adopted 2 “fur babies” and started their own pet parent journey. Along the way, they observed mealtime tantrums and health issues which pointed towards poor quality and palatability. Founders were not able to find the appropriate product out in the market and had to start from scratch for building a healthy & tasty diet at home. The entire process took more than 6 months of research and took 90 minutes daily in cooking time. In order to ensure that other pet-parents don’t have to face the same uphill battle Chinmay & Saurabh started this venture. Healthy Barks understands that pet parenting is a full-time job and therefore wants to provide end to end coverage for food related products and guidance under one roof, so that customers can focus on the most important part of being a parent, spending time with their “fur babies”. 

Market opportunity

Pet owners are striving to provide healthy & nutritious meals for their dogs. Because it is difficult for them to grasp what is good and what is not, the pets may not have a proper diet. Furthermore, the process of locating nutritious meals takes time and effort. The food available today is overprocessed and laced with toxins. Home cooked cuisine is unbalanced and difficult to handle. Healthy Barks provides balanced cooked dog food for which is healthy and available by an effortless process. There will be 25 million pets in India by 2021, which will increase to 60 million by 2026 as more people are opening up to the idea of adopting pets. By 2026, the TAM will be $59 billion.

 100X.VC Thesis

Petcare remains a big possibility for India, and the emergence of nuclear families is seeing an increase in pet adoption, therefore petcare is becoming more customised to each type of animal. The creators have solved the issue of supplying balanced nutritional food to family pets based on their needs. The founders are capable of making a scalable business out of this, therefore generating a brand. 100X.vc believes in the space and in the entrepreneurs' potential to build.

Conclusion

100X.VC feels that Healthy Barks has what it takes to build a differentiated product & brand offering in the existing fragmented Pet food industry, with a great combination of expertise, knowledge, passion for dogs, and drive to make a difference in the world. Based on their emphasis of improving the existing state of pet food and pet parenting, this growth will be born slowly but steadily, and with Chinmay, Saurabh, Ruby, and Shubham's leadership, we firmly believe in their aim and wish them good luck!