Hill’s Pet Nutrition grows nearly 60% in 5 years

Over the past 5 years, Hill’s Pet Nutrition has expanded by nearly 60%, growing from just under $3 billion (€2.7B) in 2020 to more than $4.5 billion (€4.1B) in 2025, Caroline Chulick, Senior Vice President of Global Growth and Innovation at Hill’s, said during the Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference 2026, held on 20 February. General Mills and J.M. Smucker also participated in the conference. 

According to Chulick, the brand has been the “single biggest contributor” to Colgate-Palmolive’s growth throughout its latest 5-year strategic plan. 

“We’ve been significantly and continuously outperforming the category, whether it be on the wellness side of the business with our Science Diet brands, or whether it be on the therapeutic side with our prescription diet sub-brand, we’ve consistently grown share over the last 5 years,” the SVP says.

Hill’s plans to capitalize on the continuously growing pet population in the US and on generational traction. “Younger generations – Gen Z and millennials – are acquiring pets at a much faster rate, and that’s really a worldwide trend. They are a driving force in the category,” she adds.

Marketing strategy

Hill’s is betting on data to capture its target audience, which has led to the development of a data clean room, a software solution that creates a virtual environment where multiple parties can combine and analyze their data without sharing or copying the underlying datasets, as explained by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Through this approach, Hill’s combines its owned first-party data with third-party inputs from media publishers and partners. The information is also integrated with second-party transaction or conversion data from its key retail partners in the US.

“70% of our US media spend went through this clean room last year, and we had a lot of learning,” Chulick says. “But perhaps the most important insight I can share is that we doubled our conversion rate for the media that went through it.” This approach enables personalization at scale, she concludes.

2030 strategy

During the presentation, Noel Wallace, Chairman, President and CEO of Colgate-Palmolive, also presented the group’s 5-year strategic plan, which establishes a focus on 5 key pillars to accelerate company-wide growth. 

These include expanding global reach and innovation, integrating data and AI, strengthening company culture and productivity, reorganizing the supply chain for faster decision-making, and continuing to increase dividends and shareholder returns.

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the last 5 years building innovation capabilities, but over the next 5 years, we’re going to invest exponentially more in this area, refine our processes, bring in more resources and use technology to enhance how we develop consumer-centric ideas moving forward,” Wallace concludes.