The Farmer's Dog Follows Its Oprah Deal With an NFL Partnership

Two years after skipping the Super Bowl entirely, a fresh-food subscription brand just bought a marketing platform bigger than any single game-day spot. The Farmer's Dog has been named the NFL's first-ever Official Pet Food Partner, a multi-year deal spanning Super Bowl LXI, the Combine, and the Draft, its second major league-level marketing swing this year after a two-year content deal with The Oprah Podcast.

Farmer's Dog becomes the NFL's first pet food partner

The deal, announced September 9th, makes The Farmer's Dog the NFL's inaugural Official Pet Food Partner under a multi-year agreement. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The partnership covers exclusive content and fan experiences tied to marquee league moments: Super Bowl LXI, the NFL Combine, and the NFL Draft. It also folds in three of the league's existing community platforms. My Cause My Cleats lets players design cleats honoring causes they support. NFL Salute to Service is the league's military-appreciation campaign. NFL FLAG is its national youth flag football program.

Attaching a pet food brand to programs already built around players' personal stories and community ties gives The Farmer's Dog access to emotional, cause-driven content the league has spent years building an audience around, rather than starting a media relationship from zero.

The launch campaign centers on New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo and his senior rescue dog, Duke, along with Skattebo's two Dachshund puppies, Cheech and Daizy. "I've had Duke for every high and every low," Skattebo said in the release. "He's been my teammate long before football became my career."

Tracie Rodburg, the NFL's senior vice president of global partnerships, framed the deal around the league's fan base: "Dogs are an important part of many families, and as the Official Pet Food Partner, The Farmer's Dog will help us celebrate the role they play in our lives and communities throughout the season." Jonathan Regev, The Farmer's Dog's chief executive and co-founder, called it a chance to put the brand in front of "millions more people."

The NFL deal joins a growing list of Farmer's Dog talent and league tie-ins, including a prior run with NASCAR driver Ryan Blaney, tennis player Jess Pegula, and the Dallas Cowboys and Cowboys Cheerleaders.

Why Farmer's Dog keeps spending on attention

This is the same playbook the company ran with Oprah, applied to a different audience. The Farmer's Dog signed a two-year content partnership with The Oprah Podcast in May, built around a Winfrey-narrated mini-series and sponsored episodes, after skipping the 2026 Super Bowl entirely despite its 2023 "Forever" ad topping USA Today's Ad Meter. The NFL deal is a second, much larger swing at the same goal: buy durable brand association instead of a one-off media spot.

The Farmer's Dog isn't the first pet brand to land an "official partner" title with a major sports property. Purina struck a similar deal with U.S. Soccer in August 2025, running through 2030 and spanning food, treats, litter, and supplements. What's different here is scale relative to size. Purina is a division of a company with hundreds of billions in global revenue. The Farmer's Dog is a single-category DTC subscription brand that reported $1.2 billion in annualized revenue as of early 2025. A league-wide NFL deal is a proportionally bigger marketing commitment for a company that size than the same kind of deal is for Nestlé.

It also fits a pattern that's been building since summer. The Farmer's Dog acquired the enrichment brand Woof in August, then launched Crunchy Biscuits on September 1st, its third product or portfolio move in barely a month. The NFL deal, announced eight days later, makes it a fourth. The company isn't just defending its subscription base with new SKUs. It's defending category leadership on two fronts at once. Widening what it sells, and widening how many places its name shows up.

The timing overlaps with a broader run of good news for pet retail. Petco's fiscal second quarter showed profit nearly tripling, and Chewy raised its full-year guidance the same week as this announcement, months after cutting it. A company willing to commit to a multi-year league sponsorship is making a bet that consumer pet spending, and its own subscriber base, holds up well enough to justify the multi-year cost before any of it pays back.

For operators, the read is less about football and more about what it costs to compete against a brand behaving like this. A DTC subscription business with venture-scale ambitions is now running a marketing budget that looks like a legacy consumer packaged goods company's, funded by a business that's already profitable. Smaller fresh and premium pet brands aren't just competing against The Farmer's Dog's product anymore. They're competing against its media budget.

What the NFL deal signals for Super Bowl LXI

The release ties the partnership to Super Bowl LXI, the NFL Combine, and the NFL Draft, but it describes content and fan experiences at those events, not a confirmed game-day television spot. Whether The Farmer's Dog returns to Super Bowl advertising itself, after sitting out 2026, is a separate question the announcement leaves open.

If the company does buy a Super Bowl LXI ad slot on top of this sponsorship, it would mark a full return to the marketing posture that built the brand in 2023, this time backed by a league-wide partnership rather than a standalone spot. If it doesn't, the NFL deal reads as a deliberate substitute: association and content over a single expensive broadcast moment, the same choice the company made with Oprah.

Either way, expect the campaign to lean heavily on Skattebo and Duke through the NFL season, and expect competitors to notice. Purina's soccer deal and this one both suggest sports partnerships are becoming a standard tool in premium pet marketing, not a one-off stunt. The next signal to watch is whether another major pet brand announces a comparable league partnership before the Super Bowl LXI window closes.

Source: The Farmer's Dog via PR Newswire