LOONAWELL: the Zurich dog-food brand built on a scientist's rulebook

A researcher who once worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School does not, as a rule, end up designing dog food. Yet that is precisely the path that led to LOONAWELL, a Zurich-based brand founded in 2020 to bring the same scrutiny applied to human medicine into the far less regulated world of pet nutrition. The result is a small but ambitious catalogue of organic, human-grade meals, treats and supplements, all made in Switzerland. It is a brand that talks about traceability and standards the way a laboratory would, applied here to something as ordinary as a dog’s dinner.

From the lab to the bowl

LOONAWELL’s origin story starts not with a kennel or a family recipe, but with a scientist’s frustration. Its founder holds a doctorate in biomedical sciences and spent part of her career as a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. That background is unusual in an industry more often built around tradition or marketing than laboratory method. The brand was founded in Zurich in 2020, and its stated ambition, in the founder’s own words, is nothing less than to become the most trusted pet food brand in the world. It is a bold claim from a young Swiss company, but it explains the tone of everything LOONAWELL has done since: methodical, ingredient-obsessed, and unusually vocal about proof rather than promises.

What is in the range

The LOONAWELL catalogue covers the three pillars most dog owners think about: complete meals, treats, and supplements. The meals are positioned as complete, organic, human-grade food, meaning the ingredients are described as being of a quality comparable to what might end up on a person’s plate rather than in an industrial pet-food vat. Treats sit alongside them, including pâté-style products that have recently been repackaged into a more portable format. On the supplement side, the brand has expanded into targeted support products, the most recent being a formula aimed at joint health. Seasonal and limited releases, such as gift-style treat boxes, round out the offering for owners looking for something occasion-specific. Together, the range reads less like a generic pet-food line and more like a considered set of answers to different everyday needs: daily nutrition, reward, and long-term wellbeing.

The Swiss-made difference

Everything LOONAWELL sells is manufactured in Zurich, and the brand holds Certified Organic status, a designation that is not simply decorative but tied to defined standards for how ingredients are sourced and handled. According to the brand, the ingredients used are of the highest quality, as good as, or better than, those destined for human consumption. That is a meaningful distinction in an industry where by-products and lower-grade inputs are the norm rather than the exception. LOONAWELL also states that most of its ingredients are of Swiss organic origin, which shortens supply chains and keeps sourcing close to where the food is actually made. For an owner filling a bowl, this translates into a simpler question answered plainly: where did this come from, and under what standard? It is also worth noting the brand’s claim to be the only pet food company in the world to have received a label from the Swiss Vitamin Institute, a distinction that underlines how central nutritional science is to its identity.

What the brand stands for

LOONAWELL positions itself around transparency as much as taste. Beyond ingredient quality, the brand says it wants to build new global standards for the pet food industry, in particular through blockchain technology intended to provide complete traceability from ingredient to bowl. Whether or not that ambition is realised in full, it signals a brand that thinks about accountability in structural terms, not just through packaging copy. The environmental side of the business is more immediately tangible: for every order, LOONAWELL plants a tree, in partnership with the reforestation organisation One Tree Planted. It is a modest, per-order commitment rather than a sweeping environmental claim, and it sits comfortably alongside the brand’s broader positioning as a company trying to do the unglamorous parts of the pet food business properly, from sourcing to packaging to disposal.

Right now

LOONAWELL has kept up a steady rhythm of releases over the past couple of years. In April 2025, the brand published the first edition of the LOONAWELL Cookbook, designed and printed in Switzerland, a project that suggests the company sees itself as an educator on canine nutrition as much as a manufacturer. Two months later, in June 2025, it launched FlexiLoona, a supplement aimed at supporting joint health in dogs, which went on to win a FINAT Label Award in May 2026 for its label design. The start of 2026 brought Merry Mix, a seasonal treat box built around the end-of-year holidays, and by September 2026 the brand had introduced a Discovery Pack bringing together all six of its pâté varieties in individual 60 g tubes, a format clearly designed to let owners try the full treat range without committing to full-size packaging. Taken together, these releases show a brand that moves in short, deliberate cycles: a book, a supplement, a seasonal box, a sampler pack, each building on the previous one rather than replacing it.

For readers in Switzerland

LOONAWELL is a genuinely Swiss brand in every sense that matters for provenance: founded in Zurich in 2020, manufactured in Zurich, and built around ingredients that are, according to the brand, predominantly Swiss and organic. For dog owners in Switzerland, this means a domestic supply chain rather than one crossing several borders before reaching the bowl.