Chan Patel, founder
How TENDS Came About
Twenty years inside. A decade since looking from outside.
Long enough in the pet food industry to see how products are made, what owners are told, what the science supports, and where each comes up short. Long enough also to start noticing what heritage and home each had to bring. Not in the abstract.
Specifically, in food.
Hill's Pet Nutrition, the pet food division of Colgate-Palmolive, 1996 to 2016. Twenty years across the global pet category in senior commercial leadership roles. General Manager for the Middle East and Africa region — Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Israel, Cyprus, Malta, the UAE. Then a global role as Director of Indirect Trade, building channel architecture across Russia, South Africa, CEEMA, LATAM, and Asia. From 2014, General Manager for the Far East, covering Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, with India in the developing-market remit.
The work spanned both wellness and therapeutic tiers (Science Diet and Prescription Diet) across cat and dog, vet and retailer, every stage of category development. Selected for the Tuck School of Business Global Leadership 2030 cohort during the period.
In 2019 I founded PetThinQ — analytics and insights work, from outside the industry now rather than inside it. Reading pet parents through forum conversations, product reviews and feedback at scale, thousands of product analyses, mapping where the category was answering and where it wasn't.
Hill's gave me inside looking out. PetThinQ gave me outside looking in.
What both had been pointing at was a structural answer the category was still trying to give at the marketing layer. Small dogs are a different envelope, and food designed for a larger envelope and shrunk to fit is the category's default answer to a question it hasn't quite asked properly.
That observation made TENDS the thing to build.
What heritage and home had been showing me, more quietly, was how to build it.
India is heritage. London is home — where the small-dog culture is close even though I don't have one of my own.
Both true. Both anchored. Both load-bearing.
Heritage and home.
The UK has built standards over decades. FEDIAF discipline, transparency conventions, the disclosure rigour pet parents have come to expect. That's what the category looks like grown up.
India's pet category is at a different stage — growing fast (premium and super-premium segments up more than 20% annually) but fragmented, with standards and transparency conventions still being established. Indian pet parents read the same forums and hold the same expectations as UK and US parents. They shouldn't have to wait decades for the benchmark to catch up. The benchmark already exists.
India has built plant intelligence over centuries. A culinary and medicinal lineage that has, more recently, been moving steadily into Western consumer markets: adaptogenic supplements, functional beverages, wellness foods, beauty formulations. The pet food category has barely engaged with this. TENDS draws from it directly. Ashwagandha, lotus seed, boswellia, chicory, toor dal, Bengal gram (examples, not a complete list) brought into a contemporary pet formulation. Indian consumers recognise these from their kitchens. UK and Western consumers recognise them from their wellness shelves. The recognition runs in both directions.
Neither market alone could have made this food. Both were needed. And only a founder with heritage in one and home in the other can integrate rather than import or export.
Here's what that architecture made possible at the design layer.
The food is built around the small-breed envelope — small per-meal volume, high per-kilogram energy demand, narrow daily window for delivery. Every ingredient has to earn the gram it takes. Bulk that doesn't deliver is cut. Density that doesn't fit is reduced.
Plant-based was a delivery decision before it was an environmental one. The Indian plant inventory, selected for amino-acid quality, protein-fibre balance, steady energy, prebiotic activity at controlled inclusion, and functional contribution at the per-gram level, turns out to do that work cleaner than the default plant carbohydrates the category usually reaches for at the cost-engineering end. Ashwagandha, lotus seed, and boswellia are not garnish. They earn their inclusion the same way the pea protein and the quinoa do.
We oven-bake the food once, in a dedicated capability we built rather than extending an existing pipeline, because lower-process retention keeps more of what was originally there. We made one food, complete and balanced for the small adult body, rather than a six-variant portfolio that the small-breed envelope wasn't asking for.
The food carries both, structurally, not decoratively. Mumbai is where TENDS becomes visible first — a city carrying a small-dog culture parallel to London's in the ways that matter, and ready for the brand at this moment. London is where the rest of the story continues. Built across both. Launching in Mumbai.
Big Brand? No.
A Smaller One — On Purpose.
Stay close for bold new moves in small-breed care.
