29/05/2026
The Mars pet care empire. Friend or foe?
M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way… Mars is one of the world’s largest and most famous confectionary companies. But the same privately held corporation, run by one of America’s wealthiest families, is also one of the most world’s most powerful pet food and pet care corporations. And, if this doesn’t worry you, it should!
It all started innocently enough when Frank C Mars started making and selling buttercream candy (aka chocolate to us Brits) in his kitchen in 1911. But it was his estranged son, Forrest, who really built the business into the $50 billion a year empire it is today. Forrest moved to Europe in the 1930s and started his own Mars company there, but after his father’s death returned to the US and in 1964 merged all the operations under his personal control.
The company started making pet food in the 1930s – buying inexpensive ingredients and turning it into dog and cat food. It moved into veterinary care and medical diagnostics in the 1990s. Today it owns over 50 pet food brands including Pedigree, Whiskas, Royal Canin, Cesar, Iams, and Sheba. In veterinary care, it operates Banfield Pet Hospital (more than 1,000 practices in the US), BluePearl, VCA, and the European groups AniCura and Linnaeus — totalling nearly 3,000 veterinary hospitals worldwide. In diagnostic laboratories (the services vets use to test your dog’s blood) Mars Petcare has acquired five veterinary diagnostics businesses in the past seven years. According to a KPMG report, by the way, Mars owns nearly 45% of all corporate-owned veterinary clinics.
In November 2024, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote directly to Mars to raise formal concerns. Their letter, addressed to Mars CEO Poul Weihrauch, is a fascinating document. The senators expressed concern that Mars’s vertical integration in the pet care industry may enable it to charge higher prices for essential veterinary care, and that its significant market power in veterinary diagnostics may allow it to give preference to its own diagnostics laboratories at its own clinics. They also raised the possibility that Mars’s consolidation of pet food companies leaves customers vulnerable to predatory pet food pricing.
The structure Mars has built creates a conflict of interest that no one seems to have formally resolved. If your dog falls ill from a Mars-branded pet food and is taken to a Mars-owned veterinary practice, where the blood tests are processed by a Mars-owned diagnostic laboratory — is that a system designed to serve your dog, or one designed to protect Mars?
None of this would matter quite so much if the food Mars makes were genuinely good for dogs. It isn’t. Mars’s core pet food brands – Pedigree, Whiskas, Iams, Sheba – are quintessential ultra-processed products. Most commercial dry dog foods use a processing technique known as extrusion, where ingredients are mixed, cooked, extruded, and heated again to remove moisture – a process that destroys heat-sensitive nutrients including vitamins, enzymes, and phytonutrients. In May 2025, by the way, a lawsuit was filed against Mars Petcare after Consumer Reports found that Pedigree Complete Nutrition contained more than four times the allowed level of vitamin D.
Mars has enormous control over much of what your dog eats, who treats it when it’s sick, and possibly even what the diagnostic results say. That is a remarkable concentration of power over the lives of animals. The question animal lovers need to ask themselves. Is Mars a friend or a foe?
