Nom Nom's New Frozen Format Joins Fresh Food's Packaging Race

Fresh pet food's biggest competitive fight right now isn't happening in the recipe. It's happening in the gap between the freezer and the bowl, and this week two of the category's largest brands each shipped a fix for it. Nom Nom, the fresh-frozen brand owned by Mars Petcare, introduced a scoopable meal format on Tuesday, a day after The Farmer's Dog took the opposite approach and launched a shelf-stable version of its own recipe.

Nom Nom launches scoopable frozen meal format

Nom Nom rolled out Scoopable Meal Clusters, internally nicknamed "Nombles," in two recipes: Chicken & Sweet Potato and Beef & Potato. The format pours or scoops directly from a frozen bag rather than requiring a solid block to be sliced or thawed under running water, and the company says a portion is ready to serve in about 15 minutes.

Both recipes meet AAFCO nutrient standards for all life stages. The clusters ship in 6-pound bags for e-commerce orders and 3.5-pound upright bags for specialty retail, and can be served as a full meal, a treat, or a topper, with resealable storage built into the packaging.

Nom Nom launched in 2014 and says it has delivered nearly 40 million meals through its subscription service and retail placements at Chewy, Amazon, and select PetSmart locations. It now operates as one of several fresh-pet-food brands inside Mars Petcare, which Mars, Incorporated says contributed to more than $65 billion in the parent company's 2025 net sales.

Packaging becomes fresh food's next competitive battleground

Nom Nom and The Farmer's Dog solved different problems this week, not the same one. The Farmer's Dog's Instant Fresh is a shelf-stable dry product that needs no refrigeration at all, aimed at reaching shelves a frozen product can't. Nom Nom's clusters stay inside the cold chain; they just make the frozen format itself less annoying to use. Different fixes, same underlying complaint: fresh food's format has been the thing standing between the category and a customer who doesn't want to plan a thaw schedule.

What makes the timing notable is who's doing it. The Farmer's Dog is an independent, venture-backed challenger that had reached more than $1.2 billion in annualized revenue as of early 2025. Nom Nom is a division inside the largest private pet-food company on earth. When the biggest incumbent in the category ships a friction fix in the same week as its most prominent independent rival, packaging stops being a scrappy differentiator and becomes table stakes that even Mars feels pressure to defend.

Both moves also read as a hedge against subscription fatigue. Fresh food built its growth on recurring delivery, but a customer who can grab a scoopable bag at Chewy or a shelf-stable pouch at Walmart doesn't need to commit to a subscription to try either brand. That's a bigger structural shift than either press release admits to: format innovation doubles as a hedge against the subscription model that built the category in the first place.

Neither company disclosed how the new formats are priced against their existing lines, so it's an open question whether solving the friction costs the customer more, gets absorbed into existing subscription pricing, or becomes the new default. For retailers weighing freezer-case space, that pricing gap is the detail that will actually decide whether either format earns a permanent shelf slot or ends up as a limited-run test.

What comes next in the format arms race

The Farmer's Dog already has a foothold in physical retail through Walmart.com, and a shelf-stable product is the more natural candidate for an in-store shelf than anything requiring a freezer case. Whether Instant Fresh shows up in physical Walmart locations within the next two quarters is the clearer signal to watch there.

For Nom Nom, the test is adoption inside its existing channels. Chewy and PetSmart already carry the brand, so retail expansion isn't the open question the way it is for The Farmer's Dog; whether customers actually switch from the standard frozen line to the scoopable format is. A format that outsells the product it's meant to replace tells competitors this was worth copying. One that quietly underperforms tells them the friction wasn't the real obstacle.

Watch for a response from the rest of the fresh and frozen field, Ollie, Sundays, Spot & Tango, and Freshpet among them. If a second Mars brand or a Nestlé Purina line ships its own format change within the next quarter, packaging will have officially become the category's new competitive front rather than a one-week coincidence.

Source: Nom Nom via PR Newswire