Ollie, an industry-leading subscription fresh dog food company dedicated to helping dogs thrive, has officially announced the acquisition of DIG Labs, an AI-powered diagnostic company providing real-time image-based pet health screenings across stool, weight management, skin and coat, dental care, and more.
As a part of the given development, Ollie is now set to rollout its new Foodback Loop™ solution, which happens to be a revolutionary, closed-loop, and proprietary process that leverages over 20 million first-party data points, and counting, to improve product development, recipe formulation, and feeding algorithms, ultimately achieving better health for dogs.
The acquisition will also see DIG Labs co-founder Tara Zedayko joining the Ollie team serving as Chief Scientific Officer where she will lead the Foodback Loop initiative, specifically science, research, product development, as well as Ollie’s proprietary portioning and recommendation algorithms.
The development in question delivers a rather interesting follow-up to Ollie’s initial partnership with DIG Labs, which materialized last fall to launch free app-enabled Health Screenings, prompting members to submit photos to receive expert analysis and guidance within 24 hours. This guidance could be for their dog’s digestion, weight, skin and coat, or oral health. The stated screenings, on their part, would go on to become hugely successful. In fact, since introducing Health Screening benefits over the last year, 89% of members have come to strongly agree that screenings are valuable features in their Ollie membership, while 86% of members strongly agree that Ollie health screenings give them more confidence in their decision to feed Ollie.
“Pet parent demographics are shifting to younger generations, and with the acquisition of DIG Labs, we are meeting their demand for tech-enabled and personalized products to improve the quality of life for their pets and themselves,” said Nick Stafford, CEO of Ollie. We are the only pet food company creating a direct data-led link between what we are feeding our dogs and their health outcomes through individual pet data on stool, weight, skin and coat, and teeth and gums”.
With DIG in its ranks, Ollie is now building world-class machine learning models and AI applications to deliver a lasting impact for dogs across health screenings, food R&D, recipe improvements, and evolutions to Ollie’s portion-feeding algorithms. You see, leveraging millions of data points, the company is capturing the most real-time pet-level data and using it to design and improve its recipes for maximum effectiveness. This includes turning unique learnings into personalized experiences that recommend the right food and portions for each dog so to better serve Ollie members individually and collectively.
More on the same would reveal that, thanks to these direct relationships with its members, their pet-level data, and the proprietary Foodback Loop research and development process, Ollie empowers parents to confidently feed their dogs the right food and exact portions, giving dogs a much-needed voice in their healthcare. As for the practical features Ollie customers can come expecting here, they include portion control, diet transition screenings, and recipe development and refinement. Alongside that, they are also likely to gain access to new initiatives including weight programs, customized experiences for puppies, recipe optimization for ideal stool health, and more.
Making the stated acquisition, as well as the consequential introduction of Ollie’s Foodback Loop even more important is the latter’s initial outcomes. Going by the available details, only 58% of dogs had healthy stool before joining Ollie. However, according to Ollie Digestion Screening results, 75% of dogs were able to attain healthy stool just 1-2 weeks after feeding Ollie.
As for the overall results, they show that all five of Ollie’s Fresh Plans increase healthy weight scores for dogs by 10-12% within the first few weeks.
“We are thrilled to join Ollie to help carry our shared vision forward, stewarding new applications of our technology to empower people with greater insights about their pets’ health,” said Tara Zedayko co-founder of DIG Labs, and Ollie’s new Chief Scientific Officer “We look forward to applying these technologies to improve pet health and improve their quality of life, which is so significantly impacted by their diet.”