{"id":140516,"date":"2023-05-30T16:54:38","date_gmt":"2023-05-30T20:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=140516"},"modified":"2023-05-30T16:59:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T20:59:24","slug":"pet-cause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2023\/05\/30\/pet-cause\/","title":{"rendered":"Pet Cause"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alarmed by an epidemic of diabetes in dogs and cats, an ENG grad founded a pet food company that puts nutrition first<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By Patrick L. Kennedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure, you love your furry friends and you buy them food they\u2019ll love. But how healthy is that food? That tin of cat chow or bag of doggie treats? Turns out, they\u2019re often labeled in a way that can fool even the smartest and most ardent animal devotees.<\/p>\n

Michael Landa (ENG\u201988) wants you to think about how you\u2019d feed your pets if they were elite athletes of the animal kingdom. A trained engineer and former varsity swim captain, Landa has been a business strategist in fields from high-tech sales to Hollywood, and now he runs Nulo, a fast-growing pet food brand that puts a premium on nutrition.<\/p>\n

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Michael Landa (ENG’88) receiving the BU swim team MVP award from Coach Reagh Wetmore in 1988.
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Landa grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. He walked the family dog, a Boxer named Max, during the rare moments when he wasn\u2019t swimming competitively or studying.<\/p>\n

Boston University awarded Landa a full swimming scholarship. Between logging 33 miles a week in the pool and traveling for meets, Landa had to be good at time management. Now factor in coursework. For two years he juggled both BME<\/a> and premed studies, while for the last two (when he was the swim team captain and MVP) he majored in electrical engineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt taught me to be incredibly disciplined, and to think critically about everything,\u201d says Landa. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the most important skill sets you can get, and it\u2019s served me well in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Landa started his career in high-tech sales, and with an aptitude for seeing the big picture, he quickly moved into business strategy, joining GE in San Francisco for several years. When the job required him to move to Milwaukee, he went to Hollywood instead. At Sony Pictures, Landa worked on the success-forecasting model that helped the studio decide whether to green-light films such as Men in Black<\/em> and My Best Friend\u2019s Wedding<\/em>. Next, Landa did strategic planning for Universal Studios.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Landa had a vacation coming up. While looking for a dog sitter for Max II, he struggled to find one who inspired confidence. So, instead of flying, Landa took Max II with him on a road trip to Colorado. Mulling this situation during a long stretch through the Utah desert, Landa hit upon a business idea that became The Pet Staff, Inc., a dog walking and pet sitting service with professional standards.<\/p>\n

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Landa eventually hired 200 sitters who made up to 12,000 pet visits a month\u2014from walks to overnight stays\u2014across greater Los Angeles. With highly trained staff and the first web-based scheduling system for pet care, the company earned a reputation for reliability among their clientele, which included studio heads, production folks, and on-screen talent such as Marisa Tomei (CFA\u201986, Hon.\u201902), Cybil Shepherd and Andrew McCarthy.<\/p>\n

It was while running The Pet Staff that Landa discovered an epidemic of obesity and diabetes among domestic animals. \u201cWe were getting slammed with the demand for sitters who could give insulin and shots related to diabetic dogs and cats,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when the engineer in me came out,\u201d Landa recalls. \u201cI said, \u2018There\u2019s a root cause. Something is not right with the food supply.\u2019 So, I started digging,\u201d meeting with animal nutrition scientists and learning how the industry worked. \u201cWithin two weeks, I had picked up my life in Los Angeles and moved to Austin, Texas.\u201d Landa launched Nulo in 2010.<\/p>\n

Many big brands load up their pet foods with carbohydrates, though they obscure that fact with clever marketing and packaging that suggests a healthier diet, Landa says. \u201cPet foods do not follow human standards for labeling, as ingredients are listed by weight before cooking. If consumers were better informed as to a food\u2019s nutrient composition as fed, they would likely avoid most popular brands on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Nulo, Landa says, \u201cI want every food we formulate to be high in meat, low in carbohydrates, and low-glycemic, as fed to the animal, because that\u2019s more species-appropriate for dogs and cats. They\u2019re not little kids, as much as we want them to be. They\u2019re carnivores.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy engineering background allowed me to collaborate with nutritional formulators, because I speak their language,\u201d Landa says. \u201cWe spent time iterating, iterating, iterating until we got the perfect platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above all, Landa says, \u201cIf I won\u2019t feed it to Max the 4th and Yogi,\u201d his two current black Labs, \u201cI\u2019m not going to sell it to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still a regular swimmer and hiker, Landa reached out to athlete friends and fellow pet owners such as five-time Olympic gold medalist Aaron Peirsol to recruit brand ambassadors. The roster now includes 23-time gold medalist Michael Phelps (who also invested in Nulo) and former NFL linebacker Ryan Kerrigan.<\/p>\n

\u201cAthletes understand how premium nutrition positively impacts their performance,\u201d says Landa. \u201cAnd this philosophy translates to their pets.\u201d<\/p>\n

That message has clearly resonated with a growing segment of pet owners. Nulo dog and cat foods are sold across the US and in seven other countries, and it\u2019s one of the top-selling brands in specialty pet supply stores in major cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver, to name a few. Nulo\u2019s company has grown to 75 employees (all of whom are free to bring their dogs to work), and Landa has racked up honors such as Austin Business Journal<\/em>\u2019s \u201cBest CEO in Austin\u201d and Ernst & Young\u2019s Entrepreneur of the Year.<\/p>\n

Why are people so passionate about their animal companions?<\/p>\n

\u201cThey make us happy, and they never complain,\u201d says Landa. \u201cThey\u2019re just a constant force of goodness, and I think people welcome that in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“That’s when the engineer in me came out. I said, ‘Something is not right in the pet food supply.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":140543,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,982],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140516"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140554,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140516\/revisions\/140554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}