Pup'n Stuff

Texas startup delivers top-quality dog food directly to your door

Put down the Pedigree, Fido, you're getting the good stuff.

Photo courtesy of Grocery Pup

Houstonians love their dogs. We bring them to the office, accompany them to the dog park, and take them shopping with us. We iron their bandanas, make sure their beds are comfy, and sometimes create elaborate songs that we sing to them when no one else is home. At local restaurants with patios, our canine companions are more likely to get a bowl of fresh water before our waiter has even stopped by to say hello.

With this kind of devotion, it makes sense that Grocery Pup, a new Austin-based subscription dog food delivery service, would offer its services in Houston as well. The brainchild of Ruth Stedman, Grocery Pup offers 100 percent human-grade meals delivered directly to your door.

The idea for Grocery Pup came while Stedman was in graduate school at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. When she and her fiance decided to add a puppy to their family, Stedman began researching dog food brands to find the best one. What she found instead were labels filled with indecipherable ingredients. "I realized that dog food hadn't really changed in the past few decades," says Stedman. And so, the enterprising MBA student decided to change it on her own.

She began by developing a business plan for Grocery Pup and entering it into the Texas Venture Labs Scholarship Competition, an accelerator program at UT that helps bring ideas to market. Grocery Pup won second place out of 50 projects, and Stedman was able to use the prize money hire a veterinary nutritionist to help create the food's formula. "Working with a nutritionist [was] important because if [a dog's food] isn't nutritionally balanced, you're doing more damage than any kind of dog food that's currently on the market," she says.

In August 2017, Stedman quit her corporate gig in order to focus on Grocery Pup full time. For the entrepreneur, launching the company in Austin was the perfect cultural fit. "We decided to launch here because one, I live here, but two, it's a huge dog town." (Though exact statistics on dog ownership are hard to come by, most recent U.S. census data says nearly 50 percent of all Austin households have pets, and the majority of those are dogs. The same data shows Houston not far behind.)

Today, Grocery Pup offers three fantastically named meal plans: Bitchin' Beef Stew, Turkey Pawella, and Porky's Luau. Delivery options are available monthly and include half plans (28 meals per month) or full plans (56 meals per month.) Prices range from $73-$298 per month depending on your dog's size. In addition to delivery in Austin and Houston, the service is available in Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and other Texas cities.

And if your dog is picky, don't fret about a month long commitment. Grocery Pup offers tester packs through their website and run a weekly booth at SFC Farmers' Market Downtown in Austin, where locals can check out the goods in person.

pets

2026 jobs forecast

Houston's health care sector will drive job growth in 2026, report predicts

Photo by simonkr/Getty Images

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Buoyed by the growing health care sector, the Houston metro area will add 30,900 jobs in 2026, according to a new forecast from the Greater Houston Partnership.

The report predicts the Houston area’s health care sector will tack on 14,000 jobs next year, which would make it the No. 1 industry for local job growth. The 14,000 health care jobs would represent 45 percent of the projected 30,900 new jobs. In the job-creation column, the health care industry is followed by:

Construction: addition of 6,100 jobs in 2026
Public education: Addition of 5,800 jobs
Public administration: Addition of 5,000 jobs

At the opposite end of the regional workforce, the administrative support services sector is expected to lose 7,500 jobs in 2026, preceded by:

Manufacturing: Loss of 3,400 jobs
Oil-and-gas extraction: Loss of 3,200 jobs
Retail: Loss of 1,800 jobs

“While current employment growth has moderated, the outlook remains robust and Houston’s broader economic foundation remains strong,” GHP president and CEO Steve Kean said in the report.

“Global companies are choosing to invest in Houston — Eli Lilly, Foxconn, Inventec, and others — because they believe in our workforce and our long-term trajectory,” Kean added. “These commitments reinforce that Houston is a place where companies can scale and where our economy continues to demonstrate its resilience as a major engine for growth and opportunity. These commitments and current prospects we are working on give us confidence in the future growth of our economy.”

The Greater Houston Partnership says that while the 30,900-job forecast falls short of the region’s recent average of roughly 50,000 new jobs per year, it’s “broadly in line with the muted national outlook” for employment gains anticipated in 2026.

“Even so, Houston’s young, skilled workforce and strong pipeline of major new projects should help offset energy sector pressures and keep regional growth on pace with the nation,” the report adds.

The report says that even though the health care sector faces rising insurance costs, which might cause some people to delay or skip medical appointments, and federal changes in Medicare and Medicaid, strong demographic trends in the region will ensure health care remains “a key pillar of Houston’s economy.”

As for the local oil-and-gas extraction industry, the report says fluctuations and uncertainty in the global oil-and-gas market will weigh on the Houston sector in 2026. Furthermore, oil-and-gas layoffs partly “reflect a longer-term trend as companies in the sector move toward greater efficiency using fewer workers to produce similar volumes,” according to the report.

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This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.