From Candy to Clinics: The Quiet Construction of Mars’ Pet Care Empire

Issue #293

January 19th, 2026

Quick Hits:

🤝 Instinct Science acquires ScribbleVet, advancing intelligent-native veterinary practice management

🛟 Popular pet retailer files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

 😔 52% of pets in the US receive no veterinary care for medical issues due to cost or access

🇨🇳 Why subscription-based pet food struggles to scale in China

🏠 Reimagining multifamily operations for pet-owning renters

🧀 To the (cheese) moon and back - new fun partnership for The Honest Kitchen

🧥 Dog clothing market soars amid cold, wet UK weather

🫛 Pulse growers are coming for pet food

☕️ Corgi Cafe is coming to San Francisco

🐩 Inside Westminster: The glam, grind, and cost behind show dogs

💵 American pet owners can claim up to $100k from a class action settlement

From Candy to Pet Care: How Mars Built the Most Powerful Pet Company on Earth

By any surface measure, Mars still looks like a candy company. Snickers. M&M’s. Milky Way. Global, iconic, impulse-driven brands that defined 20th-century consumer culture.

But beneath that sugar-coated exterior sits one of the most disciplined and quietly dominant strategic pivots in modern business.

Today, Mars is first and foremost a pet care and animal health conglomerate, controlling food, veterinary hospitals, diagnostics, genomics, wearables, and venture pipelines across the global pet ecosystem. The result is a privately held enterprise estimated at $112 billion, with pet care accounting for more than half of revenue and nearly all of its growth.

Mars didn’t drift into pet care. It engineered its way there, methodically and privately. What began as a hedge against confectionery volatility evolved into a system designed to capture value across nearly every stage of a pet’s life.

If you work in the pet industry, you already know Mars is huge.

What’s less obvious is how early the playbook was written, how deliberately the ecosystem was assembled, and how complete that system has now become—spanning nutrition, veterinary care, diagnostics, data, and the infrastructure binding them together.

Mars is no longer competing within the pet industry.
It is shaping its underlying architecture.

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