Tata 1mg forays into pet care, rolls out PawsNPurrs across India

Online pharmacy player Tata 1mg has entered the pet care segment with the launch of PawnNPurrs, a new category for pet medicines and supplements available on its existing app.

The expansion marks the company’s move to extend its healthcare offerings to include pets, reflecting the growing demand in urban India.

The Gurugram-based player plans to leverage its established strengths in sourcing, supply chain, and cold-chain logistics to ensure safe and timely home delivery of pet care products.

"Market is large, pain points are real and margins are strong. We expect to dominate this pace and build a fairly large business line," Prashant Tandon, Founder & CEO at Tata 1mg, told YourStory.

The service will focus on Rx-led (those that require a prescription) assortment, including pet medicines and supplements. This will also extend to food and grooming assortment from the top brands.

The service will be rolled out pan-India across 22,000 pincodes, with plans to make the products available across Tata 1mg’s retail stores and other sales channels. There are no plans to develop a separate app for the offering so far.

"As we evaluated this opportunity, we found several consumer pain points that fit well with our core platform: difficulty in finding the full assortment, lack of reliable home delivery, concerns around medicine authenticity — challenges we have successfully addressed in our core pharmacy business as well," added Tandon.

1mg's peer NetMeds, PharmEasy and Apollo24/7 already offers some sort of pet food assortment on their platforms, including Over-the-counter drugs, accessories and supplements. Other players in the pet care space include Heads Up For Tails, Drools, SuperTails, and Dr. Paws.

On the possibility of launching private-label products, Tandon said that the company “will evaluate those as we grow this category and learn more. I do believe there may be some opportunities to create products that solve unique pain points; however, at Tata 1mg, we always spend a lot of time learning and understanding the core pain points and if we can solve them effectively. Right now, we are in the active learning phase.”

The service will solve key problems like limited home delivery and vet consultations, as well as limited assortment in pharmacies, forcing pet parents to seek multiple places for food, supplements and medicines. This would allow the Tata Group entity to enter the Rs 7,500 crore pet care market in India. Within pet care, it primarily plans to focus on the Rs 1,500 crore pet medicine and supplements segment.

Tata 1mg, acquired by the Tata Group in 2021, operates a full-stack outpatient healthcare business, offering diagnostics, teleconsultations, private label offerings, rapid medicine delivery, along with offline retail and institutional healthcare.