Our Pet Care Center

A Place for Discovery

From studying the causes of pet obesity to discovering how to help extend a pet's healthy years, more than 500 experts, including nutritionists, veterinarians, behaviorists, engineers and food scientists, are at work every day at Nestlé Purina. In addition to studying pet health and happiness, we also work hard to discover science-based insights that help enrich the lives of pets and the people who love them.  

Pets are the center of all we do. We even have a Pet Care Center where we work to better understand the well-being and behavior of pets. Home to dogs and cats of all types and ages, the Pet Care Center is intentionally designed to parallel the love and attention pets receive in a pet owner’s home so we can accurately study the nutritional and emotional needs of dogs and cats. The state-of-the-art facility provides a quality home to these pets, including "cat condominiums" for the comfort of our resident cats, regular enrichment and exercise routines that help our pets (and employees) bond and stay active.

A Comfortable Home for Pets

You may be wondering what the resident pets are like in our Pet Care Center, and what goes on in a day in their life. Our pets participate in feeding studies, including palatability and digestibility, to help ensure our foods are as nutritious as they are great-tasting.  All of our pets have names, enjoy comfortable living quarters, and get plenty of play with and love from our staff.  

We do not participate in any invasive research – this is against our ethics – and we conduct only those procedures that are consistent with excellence in veterinary care.  We love pets, and everything we do is designed to give them a happy and fulfilling life.  Ensuring that our pets are happy also helps promote more accurate study results. That's because simple stress often changes the outcomes of a study, and even a modest change in temperature or noise-level can throw off results. 

Feeding Trials - What They Are and Why They Matter

We believe that pet food with excellent nutrition is only good if pets love eating it, and if their bodies can digest it. That's why we go beyond formulating our products for how they'll look on the label or to make marketing claims, and conduct feeding studies to make sure that our foods are nutritious, delicious and digestible for pets, and that owners like feeding them just as much as pets like eating them.   Our feeding studies also help us understand how our foods affect a pet's physiology. Our research portfolio includes our ground-breaking Life-Span Study, which showed a lifetime of proper feeding could extend a dog’s healthy years.  

Learn more about our Purina Life-Span study.