I’ll never forget the woman who walked into one of our stores in Joburg with her phone out, showing a screenshot from some veterinary nutrition paper she’d found online. She’d highlighted a paragraph about dogs not producing amylase in their saliva. And she wanted to know which of the brands we stocked actually took that into account. Not which one was cheapest. Not which bag looked nicest. She wanted the science to match up.
Three years ago, that kind of conversation basically never happened. Now it happens weekly.
I run the e-commerce side of Canine & Co. We’ve got 18 stores across South Africa, split between Gauteng, KZN, and the Western Cape. So I get to see what’s selling, what people search for on the site, what they’re clicking. And honestly, the shift has been dramatic. Pet owners aren’t just grabbing whatever’s on the shelf anymore. They’re reading ingredient panels. They’re comparing protein percentages. A guy in our Durban store last month asked a staff member to explain the difference between chicken meal and fresh deboned chicken. Five years ago that question didn’t exist in our world.
This isn’t a niche thing anymore
You’ve probably seen the stat. The global pet industry crossed $320 billion or thereabouts in 2025. Big number. But the part that actually matters for people running pet businesses is where the money’s going. It’s not budget kibble driving the growth. It’s premium. Raw food, freeze-dried, grain-free, single-protein formulas. Stuff that was practically unheard of on mainstream shelves ten years back.
The industry has a term for it. “Pet humanisation.” Sounds a bit academic, sure. But the idea is dead simple. People treat their pets like kids now. And when your dog sleeps on your bed and comes on holiday with you, you start caring about what’s in the food bowl the same way you’d care about what your toddler eats for breakfast.
I used to think this was a Sandton thing. Affluent suburb, people with money to burn on fancy dog food. Nope. We see it in Paarl. In Durban. In Centurion. Customers everywhere are doing their own research on vet blogs, YouTube, Reddit, wherever. They come into stores already knowing more than some of our junior staff. That bit was a wake-up call, I won’t lie.
The biology piece that rewired how we do training
There’s one particular bit of science that keeps popping up, and once I understood it properly, it changed how we train our whole floor team.
So here’s the thing about dogs. Short digestive tract. Stomach pH sitting around 1 to 2, which is really acidic. Their whole system is set up to rip through meat and bone fast. They’re not great with starch. And cats? Even more extreme. Obligate carnivores. Can’t make their own taurine. If taurine isn’t coming from animal tissue in the food, they’re just not getting it. Full stop.
But then you look at what’s in a lot of mainstream kibble. 40, sometimes 50 percent carbohydrate. Why? Not because dogs need that much grain. Because it’s cheap. Starches and cereals are what hold the pellet together during manufacturing. It’s basically an engineering decision that got normalised over decades.
Once our staff can explain that calmly, without sounding like they’re lecturing, something clicks with customers. They stop feeling like they’re being sold to and start feeling like they’re being helped. And that’s the whole game, really. The selling part is easy once somebody trusts you.
Our secret weapon turned out to be product descriptions
Alright, this is the most concrete takeaway I can offer anyone in retail who’s reading this. We made a call early on that every product on our online pet shop, would get a proper, detailed write-up. I’m talking ingredient breakdowns, who the food suits, what makes the formula different. Not the lazy two-liner you see on most pet store websites.
Seemed like a small thing at the time. Turned out to be massive.
People started spending ages on the site. We’d get DMs saying stuff like “I just spent an hour going through your product pages and I actually understand what I’m buying for the first time.” And those people would buy. Because by the time they’d read through a few listings, they’d already decided they trusted us. We didn’t have to convince them of anything. The descriptions did that work.
Most pet retailers online give you a picture and a price. Maybe a brand tagline. That’s it. We decided that wasn’t enough, and the payoff has been bigger than basically any paid campaign we’ve run.
The bigger lesson here isn’t just about pet food
Look, I talk to people in other retail spaces. Skincare, supplements, baby stuff. The pattern is identical. Customers have gotten sharp. They can smell when “natural” on a label is marketing fluff versus a real commitment to ingredients. The brands doing well right now aren’t the ones with the fattest ad budgets. It’s the ones being transparent. Actually telling people what’s in the product and why.
If you’re a smaller retailer, that’s your whole edge right there. You’re not going to out-discount Checkers or Pick n Pay. But you can absolutely be the place where someone walks in stressed about their old Labrador’s joints and leaves feeling like they made a good call. That person’s coming back. The big chains can throw promotions around all they want. They can’t do that.
Where this goes from here
Breed-specific nutrition is getting real traction now. People are cottoning on to the fact that a Dalmatian handles purines completely differently to, say, a Boerboel. Or that Huskies and Malamutes sometimes battle with zinc absorption in ways that other breeds just don’t. And functional diets, food built around managing a specific health issue rather than just keeping an animal alive, are moving off the vet’s shelf and into regular retail.
The people pushing all of this forward aren’t wellness influencers or biohackers or whatever. They’re regular pet owners who typed “best food for my puppy” into Google one evening after work and ended up three hours deep in ingredient comparisons. That’s genuinely how it starts. And once you’ve gone down that road, you don’t come back.
If your business can meet that curiosity with straight answers instead of marketing waffle, you’ll earn the kind of loyalty that no promo code or flash sale can touch.
Kim Irwin is the Head of E-Commerce at Canine & Co, a South African pet supplies retailer with 18 stores across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape.
(DISCLAIMER: The information in this article does not necessarily reflect the views of The Global Hues. We make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability or completeness of any information in this article.)
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