Fi's Supplement Push Hits Its First Recall

A GPS-collar maker's first foray into supplements just hit a food-safety recall less than two years in. Fi is pulling two dog supplements sold on Amazon and Chewy after testing turned up potential Salmonella contamination in a supplied ingredient, a stumble that lands squarely inside the company's push from hardware into regulated consumer products.

Fi recalls two supplements over Salmonella risk

The recall covers two of the four supplements Fi launched in January 2025: the 8-in-1 Formula daily supplement (lot 26159) and the Calming daily supplement (lot 26118), both sold in 180-gram containers.

Vet Plus, Inc., the entity behind the Fi brand, told the FDA the contamination traces to an ingredient supplied to its manufacturer. The affected lots moved through three channels: DTC sales, Amazon, and Chewy.

The recall notice, published by the FDA on September 8th, states the company suspended production of the affected line while it investigates. No injuries or illnesses in pets or people had been reported as of the announcement.

Salmonella exposure in dogs typically shows up as lethargy, diarrhea, fever, or vomiting. The FDA's notice also flags a secondary risk to people who handle the contaminated product or clean up after an affected dog. Consumers are told to stop using the recalled lots and dispose of them in household trash. No return process is required.

Fi's supplement line launched with four formulas: Calming, Skin & Coat, Hip & Joint, and the 8-in-1 blend now under recall. All four were pitched as filling nutritional gaps left by typical dog food and were formulated to meet National Animal Supplement Council standards. The two recalled formulas were also two of the line's higher-volume sellers, sold through Fi's own site as well as two of the largest pet e-commerce retailers in the country.

What Fi's recall means for hardware-to-CPG bets

Fi built its business on hardware. The company has sold GPS-tracking collars with cellular connectivity since its early years, backed in part by a $30 million Series B in 2021, sold alongside a data subscription. Supplements are a different kind of product entirely. A collar can ship with a firmware bug and get patched over the air. A contaminated ingredient reaches a dog's bowl before anyone can intervene.

The move into supplements followed a familiar hardware-company logic, sell a device once, then find recurring revenue to sell alongside it. Wearable and connected-health companies have chased that math for years, pairing sensors with consumables to push customer lifetime value past a single hardware sale. Fi's Ultra satellite tracker, which launched earlier this year, extended the hardware side of that strategy. The supplement line extended the consumables side, and did so in powdered form, a format with its own history of ingredient-sourcing exposure across the broader pet supplement category.

Consumables answer to a different regulator than hardware does, though. A collar recall is typically a manufacturing or software defect. A supplement recall is a pathogen problem, with real stakes for the animals eating the product and the people handling it. The National Animal Supplement Council standards printed on Fi's packaging cover formulation and quality claims. They don't guarantee an ingredient supplier's facility stays clean.

For any pet brand eyeing the same hardware-to-consumables jump, the lesson isn't that supplements carry more abstract risk than a collar does. It's that supply chain diligence on an ingredient supplier needs the same rigor a hardware company puts into a component vendor, and that a recall inside the first 20 months of a new product line lands harder than one from an established supplements maker with a longer trust record to draw on.

Whether the recall dents Fi's supplement expansion

Fi hasn't said when the paused line resumes production, or whether Skin & Coat and Hip & Joint face the same ingredient-supplier exposure as the two recalled formulas. Both answers matter for how contained this stays.

The company's next moves will signal how it's treating the incident. A full four-product pause paired with a public ingredient-traceability fix reads very differently than a narrow two-SKU recall with the rest of the line left running untouched.

Retail partners are the next data point worth tracking. Amazon and Chewy pulled or flagged the recalled lots as part of the FDA process. Whether either retailer applies extra scrutiny to Fi's remaining supplement listings, or to the category more broadly, would be a signal beyond this single event.

Fi's core business is still the collar. A contained recall on a two-year-old product line is unlikely to shake the subscription base built around the hardware. A recall that widens, or a second one inside the same product family, would raise a harder question: whether a company built on precision hardware has the supply chain muscle for a category where the failure mode is biological instead of mechanical.

Source: Fi via FDA