June 17, 2021:

Brands spotted

This week, we've spotted flip flops made with renewable materials, naturally-flavored nutritional yeast, and elevated sexual wellness products.

This week in launches, there's POMP, a flower delivery brand that sources blooms from family-owned farms in Southern Colombia. Twotwo is a brand offering a fresh take on the padel racket. Then there's Waeve, a Black women-owned company making real and synthetic wigs. And Petaluma, an oven-baked, plant-based dog food brand we spotted back in April, that went live on Tuesday.

We've covered environmentally-friendly dog food brands in the past and the pet food category, even for cats, continues to grow. So we posed Petaluma a similar question: do dogs need plant-based food, and who exactly might be buying this type of product?

"Just like humans, [dogs] can thrive on a well-formulated diet that has enough protein regardless of whether it was from an animal or a plant," says cofounder Caroline Buck. "We formulated Petaluma to try to that radically sustainable product to offer an alternative to consumers who may already be buying things that are more sustainable throughout their household, but for whatever reason, pet food has kind of been overlooked."