Talk to anyone with a dog or a cat in an Indian city and they'll tell you, half joking, that the pet eats better than they do. It's not really a joke. Premium kibble, specific treats the vet recommended, litter that has to be a certain brand or the cat simply refuses to use it, the occasional emergency order because someone forgot the food was running low and a hungry pet doesn't care about your delivery ETA.

None of this shows up as its own category anywhere. It gets folded into "groceries" on a bank statement, indistinguishable from your own vegetables and rice, even though pet supplies follow a completely different rhythm. Different frequency. Different brands people are far less willing to substitute on. Different urgency, because running out of cat litter at 11 PM is a genuinely different kind of problem than running out of chips.

Most quick commerce apps treat pet supplies as an afterthought category, buried a few menus deep, not really built around how pet owners actually shop. Reordering the same three or four products on a loop, needing quantities most default cart sizes don't account for, and dealing with brand loyalty that's less about preference and more about a pet who will simply not eat the substitute.

There's a financial blind spot hiding in this too. Pet ownership in Indian cities has grown fast, and with it, a category of monthly spending that's substantial for a lot of households and almost never tracked separately from everything else. Someone can tell you exactly what they spent on their own skincare last month and have no real idea what the dog cost them, not because they don't care, but because it's never been broken out as its own line anywhere they look.

Grokly's current pet category is still early, and we'd rather say that plainly than oversell it. What we think it should eventually look like is less "pet food exists somewhere in the catalog" and more a category that actually understands repeat purchase patterns the way it's starting to for human groceries, paired with a spending picture that finally shows pet owners what their pet genuinely costs each month instead of leaving it to disappear into a grocery total that was never really telling the whole story.