Lucy It started with a bowl we couldn’t get right.
Lucy and Bo are two rescued Indigenous Hounds. This company is named after them, and it exists because of a problem we lived with long before we thought of building anything.
Both dogs came to us underweight and unwell. With time and care, most of that turned around. One thing didn’t: Lucy’s digestion never became reliable.
For long stretches, her gut was the thing that governed our week. Recurring upset, the narrowing of her diet down to a single veterinary food and a short list of home-cooked meals we knew were safe, and the quiet dread of switching anything - because a new food could undo weeks of stability in a day.
What that taught me is that for a dog like Lucy, the problem often isn’t price or premium ingredients. It’s design intent. Very little of what’s on the shelf is built, from the ground up, to be gentle and predictable day after day. That’s the gap I kept running into - and eventually decided to work on properly.
Complete first. Then designed around the gut. Then proven.
Those three, in that order, are the whole discipline. We won’t trade nutritional completeness for a digestive story, we won’t make health claims we haven’t earned, and we’d rather say “we don’t know yet” than borrow confidence we don’t have.
Completeness is non-negotiable.
A food designed for sensitive dogs is only worth making if it’s also a complete daily diet. Digestive tolerability is a design goal layered on top of sound nutrition - never a substitute for it.
Consistency is a feature.
For a sensitive dog, the bag that behaves differently from the last one is the enemy. We treat ingredient sourcing and processing control as part of the product, not back-office detail.
Evidence before claims.
This stays a hypothesis until the work proves otherwise. We’d rather be honest about what we don’t yet know - including where it disappoints - than market an outcome we haven’t earned.
The dog who can’t speak for itself.
Lucy couldn’t tell us what was wrong; we had to work it out. That’s the standard we’re trying to hold - food designed for the animal that has no say in what ends up in its bowl.
The founder.
Lucy & Bo was founded by Chintan Sunil - an engineering graduate, an IIM Mumbai alumnus, with a Diploma in Data Science from IIT Madras and a Six Sigma Black Belt certification from the Indian Statistical Institute. Over fifteen years he has led supply chain and operations across India, the USA, Canada and the Middle East - most recently the inventory-planning function at Mensa Brands, and the full P&L for e-commerce and modern-trade sales and distribution at Touchstone Group. His earlier career spans J.P. Morgan and ICICI Prudential, and healthcare capability-building across East and West Africa.