Earth Rated, the Montreal-based pet care brand best known for its compostable waste bags, has expanded its grooming line with Vet-Developed Eye & Ear Wipes — a product built in collaboration with Dr. Stephanie Malmquist, DVM, brought on as a paid veterinary consultant. The move is less about a single SKU and more about a credentialing strategy: in a crowded pet wellness aisle, third-party professional validation is increasingly how brands earn both buyer placement and consumer trust.
The pet care category has followed a well-worn playbook from human wellness — premiumization, routine-building, and clinical authority. According to category benchmarks, eye and ear maintenance represents one of the lowest household compliance areas in dog grooming, which means the addressable market for habit-forming products is real and underserved. Earth Rated is positioning these wipes not as a reactive remedy but as a proactive daily ritual — a framing that aligns with how premium supplement and dental brands have successfully expanded basket size in pet specialty retail.
For brands operating in adjacent CPG or hospitality-adjacent verticals — think branded pet amenities at hotels, grooming-forward dog daycare operators, or boutique pet retail — this launch is worth watching as a retail-readiness signal. The vet-developed claim functions like a third-party audit: it shortens the buyer conversation, supports premium price-point justification, and reduces SKU risk perception at the category-manager level. Brands pursuing Chewy, PetSmart, or independent pet specialty placement are increasingly expected to arrive with some form of professional endorsement baked into the product story, not bolted on in marketing after the fact.
The broader intelligence here is about brand launch sequencing and how operators and emerging CPG brands structure credibility before they pursue distribution. Earth Rated didn't launch the wipe and then find a vet — the DVM was embedded in development. That sequencing matters to buyers, and it matters to the media and PR placement strategy that follows. A press release leading with 'Vet-Developed' is only as durable as the development process behind it. When that process is documented and defensible, it becomes a content asset across retail, digital, and earned media channels simultaneously.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
