IAMS

It still has more purchases to make.

Later on, Mars also bought out the Iams and the Eukanuba pet food business from Procter & Gamble in a deal of roughly $2.9 billion reported at the time, consolidating the premium and then super premium shelf space at U.S. pet stores as well as veterinary clinics.

Blue Pearl Veterinary Partners was purchased in 2015.

And Blue Pearl, a specialty in emergency veterinary hospital network, gave Mars a foothold in higher acuity care.

By the mid-2020s, Mars was entrenched across the entire pet care value chain in a way that very few competitors were able to match.

Now, a useful way to see this is to follow a pet's life as a consumer would, so we can kind of trace through things.

First, a new puppy owner can go and buy pedigree at a supermarket, or Iams or Neutro at a pet specialty store, Royal Canin at a veterinary clinic or a specialty retailer, or Eukanuba or Natura-type products through other channels.

And all of them, every single thing that we've listed here, are Mars brands.

when they first started, Vets started selling, I think it was

Iams.

The first one I remember, kind of that snotty, buy it from your vet if you really love your pet.

Yeah, I don't have any food.

Sometimes they'd have cereal days based on whether they were omnivores or carnivores or whichever.

Except for one of our cats who refused to eat anything except Iams for her entire life.

She almost starved herself.

Yes.

So actually, Mars Pet Care is the global leader in the pet care industry.

Many people do not know, but obviously we own the food businesses of several billion dollar brands, such as Royal Canning, Pedigree, Whiskas, Iams, Temptations, Greeny.

So we have a fantastic portfolio of pet food brands.

But beyond our food business, which is completely iconic, we also own thousands of veterinary clinics across the world.

So it's way back in the day, agency world on the youngest consumers, which are babies.

And then what we called fur babies when I started to work with Iams and Eukanuba.

We didn't call them that back in the day.

[laughs]

Not exclusivity, but accessibility.

I bring this up because Snehal was excited to tell us about a new Iams line built around digestion, immunity, and coat health, pairing functional solutions with nutrition that doesn't cut corners, but also doesn't require a second mortgage.

So we've recently, um, taken a look at our Iams product lines, for example.

Mm.

Yeah.

I think in the, the times of Don Draper, clearly it wasn't.

So what do I, um, what did I do at Mars? I've, I've been with Mars, the, the, the company behind brands like Snickers, M&M's, Pedigree, and Iams, uh, ac- uh, for the last 13 years.

Um, and, uh, I've been slowly building what we call the, a marketing, uh, effectiveness, uh, center of expertise there.

Uh, what does that mean? It means, uh, onboarding, uh, external partners, building internal solutions, um, with the ultimate goal to make better decisions when it comes to advertising effectiveness, media ch- channel choices, and media strategy.

They played Nessun Dorma with, for President Xi while he was in Uh, uh, the United States visiting President Trump at the biggest dinner that they held during his entire visit, they played Nessun Dorma.

We know the symbolism of Nessun Dorma and what it means, right? And Jenny, I saw an Iams commercial three days ago that had Nessun Dorma is in it.

[laughs]

Iams is for dog food.

And so-

Wow.