Our story
An engineer, his two cats, and a bowl he couldn't verify
Growlrr began at a kitchen counter, not a boardroom. It was built by one person for two specific cats — and everything we make still carries the fingerprints of how it started: years spent watching wild animals eat, and a career spent making things precise enough to put inside a human heart.
Before Growlrr, our founder — Prasanna M — spent four years, from 2014 to 2018, in the field, in wildlife conservation. He tracked free-ranging animals across some of the wildest corners of the region: elephants moving through the coffee estates of Coorg, tigers in Pench Tiger Reserve, ibex and snow leopard in the high cold desert of Spiti, orangutans in the forests of Batang Toru in Sumatra, and hornbills in Arunachal Pradesh.
You learn something in the field that no feeding chart teaches: how healthy animals actually eat, move, and hold condition when nobody is measuring them. Their food is never the same twice, yet they stay in remarkable shape. What holds steady isn't any single meal — it's a few underlying principles the varied diet keeps satisfying. Those years are where the idea we now call BARC — Biologically Appropriate, Residually Corrected quietly took shape: feed in a way that's biologically appropriate, and correct only the small residual gaps a home kitchen can't see.
His training pointed the other direction — toward precision. Prasanna is a mechanical engineer with a master's in computational mechanics from the University of Cincinnati, and he spent his working years doing cardiovascular stent R&D in Menlo Park, California, at a stent company Johnson & Johnson acquired for US$1.4 billion in 2006. That is the discipline of designing a tiny object to a tolerance, then proving it holds before it's ever trusted with a life. You don't hope a stent is right. You validate that it is.
Then, after the COVID pandemic, he adopted two cats and started cooking fresh for them — a genuine act of care, and a choice more and more Indian pet parents are making. But one part turned out to be genuinely hard: being sure the bowl was actually complete. Hitting the exact daily micronutrient targets — calcium, iodine, zinc, copper, the B-vitamins, taurine for cats — meal after meal, whatever cut of meat was fresh that day. He could cook the food. He couldn't verify it. And the gap is real: when researchers evaluated 200 home-prepared pet-food recipes, the great majority fell short on at least one essential nutrient, in exactly the places a cook can't see.
So he did the only thing his two halves knew how to do — he treated it as an engineering problem. The field-biology instinct said: don't replace the fresh bowl, keep it. The medical-device instinct said: then build the correction to a tolerance, and validate it. That became Growlrr — and, at its heart, the Growlrr BowlBalancer: a single, purified, precisely-dosed 5 gram micronutrient sachet that lands the floor a fresh home bowl is missing.
Founded by
Growlrr was founded by Prasanna M — a computational-mechanics engineer (Master's, University of Cincinnati) who spent his career in cardiovascular stent R&D in Menlo Park, California, and four years in field wildlife conservation. He built it for his own two cats, having noticed how carefully we think about our own nutrition and how little of that thinking reaches an obligate carnivore. That became the BARC Protocol — backed by 1 Million+ Monte Carlo simulations and ten open-access papers with DOIs — so that fresh home feeding works for any pet.
Four things the field taught us, that the feeding charts don't
Every one of these came from watching animals that nobody was feeding, and all four are built into the framework rather than written on it.
A varied diet beats a monodiet
No wild predator eats one thing. Variety is not a luxury in a wild diet, it is the mechanism — it is what keeps the gaps from lining up in the same place every day. A bowl built on one protein inherits that protein’s shortfalls, every single day, which is exactly how a careful owner ends up with a deficiency.
Nutrition is not a cliff
Feeding frameworks tend to treat every daily micronutrient target as a ledge the animal falls off the moment it is missed. That is not how a body works. A healthy animal carries reserves — days for some nutrients, weeks or months for others — and draws on them without drama. We model that explicitly, with tissue buffer, storage and depletion behaviour and exponential moving averages, instead of pretending each day stands alone.
Movement is the baseline, not a bonus
Healthy wild animals move, constantly, and their intake only makes sense against that. Nutrition prescribed without breed-appropriate activity is half an answer — which is why every plan we build is sized to how the animal actually lives, not to a label bracket.
Evolution already solved feast and famine
Nature does not hand prey over with a measuring cup. Intake in the wild swings, and a healthy animal absorbs that swing — so a framework that only works when every gram is exact is a framework that does not survive a real kitchen. We built stochastic Monte Carlo models of that variance instead of assuming it away.
And then we measured it
Because the fourth one is testable, we tested it. Across 1 million+ simulated bowls, the framework clears the NRC 2006 floor on 99.985% of fed days for dogs and 99.977% for cats — stated at the conservative Wilson C99.99 bound, not the friendlier C95 one. We are not aware of another pet-food company publishing a number of this shape. We can, because we built the models that produce it.
Whose shoulders this stands on
BARC did not appear from nowhere, and the name is a deliberate nod. Two people cleared this ground long before we got here, and it would be poor form not to say so.
Dr Ian Billinghurst, the Australian veterinarian whose Give Your Dog a Bone (1993) set out the BARF diet — Biologically Appropriate Raw Food — made the argument that a dog is built for the food it evolved on, not for a pellet. That argument is the first half of ours, and the first two words of our name are his. We part company with him on one thing, and it matters: we do not feed raw. Raw carries documented Salmonella, Listeria and antimicrobial-resistant E. coli risk, and that is harder to manage in an Indian kitchen in an Indian climate. We keep biologically appropriate and gently cook it.
Dr Sean Delaney (BS, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Nutrition)), past clinical nutrition faculty at UC Davis, founded Balance IT in 2003 and did something nobody had done at scale: put real nutrient computation behind home-prepared recipes, and made it usable by ordinary owners and their vets. The idea that a home bowl should be calculated rather than hoped over is his lineage, and we are downstream of it.
What we added is the part their eras did not have the compute for. Nutrition modelled as a buffer rather than a cliff — tissue stores, depletion and exponential moving averages, instead of treating every day as pass/fail. And stochastic Monte Carlo simulation of a real kitchen’s variance, so the claim is a distribution across a million bowls rather than an average. Then we published the whole framework open, under Creative Commons, so it can be checked and built on — which is the only honest way to stand on somebody else’s shoulders.
Dr Billinghurst and Dr Delaney have no connection to Growlrr and have not endorsed it. Their work is credited here because it came first.
What that origin means for your pet
Growlrr's authority is engineering plus field biology plus a demanding owner — not a clinic and not a lab coat. We think that's the more useful combination. The field-biology half gives the standard its shape: a diet built around what keeps a healthy animal in condition — fresh, local, species-appropriate protein, a balanced mix of chicken, mutton, farmed fish like tilapia and egg (with curd and a little veg for dogs). The engineering half gives it its proof: the sachet is designed to a tolerance, then validated the way an engineer validates a design.
That's why every recipe is stress-tested across more than a million simulated bowls — accounting for the real day-to-day variation in grocery meat — against NRC 2006, the National Research Council's research standard for the nutrient requirements of dogs and cats. It's what lets you swap chicken for fish one day without recalculating anything. The two-part method has a name — the BARC protocol — and you can read exactly how we validate it.
We're based in Chennai and ship across India, and the sachet is made to nutraceutical standards at a leading WHO-GMP · HACCP · FSSAI certified facility. We build for healthy dogs and cats at every life stage — not clinical cases — and we're clear about the line between adequate and ideal: a single-protein bowl can clear the floor, but the diverse, balanced bowl is the one we recommend and the one we designed for.
Growlrr Foods Pvt Ltd
Hold on — isn't Growlrr a dating app?
No. That one is Growlr, with one r. Ours has two. Entirely different outfit, entirely different species.
We picked the sound before we picked anything else. A growl is about the oldest noise a carnivore makes and the one furthest from a pellet — it is an animal being an animal, which happens to be the entire argument of this company. The second r is ours.
So the name is meant to carry what the food does: a little freedom, a little way back toward the wild, for a creature that has otherwise agreed to live on your sofa. That is what a biologically appropriate bowl is for. The mandala is the same idea drawn rather than written: a lion, held in order.
Build a bowl for your pet
Tell us your pet's species, weight and activity, and the recipe-builder returns a complete daily plan — grams of fresh food to buy, and the number of 5 g sachets to add.