India’s Pet Economy: Part 2 - Food, finance, and the future of care (#532)

When I first visited India 10 years ago, veterinary care felt deeply local.

A single veterinarian. A modest clinic. A hand-painted sign.

Perhaps a ceiling fan turning slowly above an exam table.

Medicine lived close to the community.

Today, something more complex is forming.

The pet food boom has created momentum, and momentum attracts capital.

What begins with kibble rarely ends there.

India’s pet market is now drawing two very different forces at once:

• Global nutrition companies with decades of research, and

• Large Indian conglomerates with enormous reach and affordability.

The contrast is striking.

Global brands bring science, prescription diets, and long clinical histories.

But they are expensive, often adapted from Western feeding models, and sometimes feel culturally distant.

Indian brands bring accessibility and price points that ordinary families can manage.

But they have shorter track records and are still building veterinary trust.

One offers polish.

The other offers reach.

Both are reshaping expectations.

And once expectations change and owners begin buying formulated diets, supplements, and preventive care products, the next step is almost inevitable.

They seek more medical care. Better diagnostics. Specialized treatments. Convenience.

And that is where veterinary medicine enters the frame.

In India, most clinics today are still independently owned. A veterinarian serving a neighborhood. A relationship built over years. Medicine shaped by familiarity.

It reminds me very much of America twenty years ago.

Before consolidation.

Before private equity.

Before practices became assets.

But the early signals are already visible.

Digital health platforms like Tata 1mg are moving into pet medicines and supplies, controlling not just products but the pathway to customers.

Pharmaceutical companies are stepping from drugs into nutrition.

Behind the scenes, investment money is funding logistics networks, labs, and platforms.

In other countries, this is precisely how consolidation began.

First the ecosystem.

Then the clinics.

There are benefits, of course.

Corporate systems can mean:

• Modern facilities,

• Predictable salaries,

• Less paperwork, and

• Better equipment.

For a young veterinarian just starting out, those things matter.

But experience elsewhere has shown the quieter costs:

• Clinical decisions shaped by metrics,

• Loss of ownership,

• Reduced autonomy, and

• Medicine filtered through spreadsheets.

We’ve all seen it happen.

Good people working hard, yet slowly feeling that something essential has shifted, and that care has been standardized into something thinner.

Not worse, perhaps. But less personal. Less human.

India has an unusual advantage right now.

It can watch what happened elsewhere and choose differently.

It can ask:

• How much scale is helpful?

• How much is too much?

• How do we modernize without losing soul?

Because veterinary medicine is not just a service industry.

It is a profession rooted in trust, in the small conversations across exam tables, and in knowing the names of the animals and the children who love them.

Pet food may be where the economic change is easiest to see.

Veterinary medicine is where its consequences will be felt.

I’m not an economist or investor.

Just an aging veterinarian who has watched these cycles repeat.

And whenever finance enters animal care, I find myself hoping for balance.

Progress, yes.

Access, absolutely.

But never at the expense of the quiet, stubborn humanity that brought most of us into this work in the first place.

Because at the end of the day, a clinic is not a market.

It’s a place where someone walks in carrying an animal they love.

And that moment deserves more than a balance sheet.

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