I and love and you Just Hired a Big CPG Exec. That's Not the Professionalization Story You Think It Is.

Dan Waters ran Hu, the natural chocolate brand, as CEO before joining I and love and you.

The consensus: indie brands need Big CPG discipline to scale

The obvious read on this hire is professionalization. I and love and you, a natural-channel independent since 2010, just named Waters as CEO. He previously led Hu and Enjoy Life Foods, both as CEO, and held CMO roles at Bel Brands in the U.S. and Europe. The pattern looks clean: bring in the executive who knows how to run margin discipline, tighten SKU counts, and prep the P&L for either acquisition or a major retail expansion into mass. Natural brands eventually need someone who has scaled before, and Waters has that track record.

That reading is incomplete.

What the hire actually shows: they're doubling down on premium, not pivoting to mass

Waters didn't come from Nestlé or Mars. He came from Hu and Enjoy Life, two brands that delivered consistent double-digit growth, according to the company, while staying in premium natural channels and refusing to compromise on ingredient standards. The source describes Hu as the leading natural chocolate brand in the US and UK. Enjoy Life became one of the leading names in allergen-free food. Neither brand got there by cutting to the lowest SKU count that Walmart would take or by reformulating down to a price point.

The company's own statement makes the strategy explicit. Waters said cat makes up more than half of the combined business between I and love and you and Made by Nacho, the cat food brand the company acquired earlier this year. The play isn't mass distribution. It's owning the premium cat segment in the channels that will pay for it, natural, grocery, pet specialty, and e-commerce, where the company said the brands have more than 30,000 combined doors nationwide.

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Who benefits from the consensus being believed

If buyers read this as a signal that I and love and you is about to pivot mass and tighten terms, they pull back on reorders and wait to see the new assortment. That creates exactly the opening a competitor needs to take the endcap while the brand is in transition.

If the brand were actually prepping for mass, the hire would look different. You'd see someone from a brand that successfully made that jump, a Blue Buffalo alum, someone who ran a category at Chewy and knows how to operate at scale with centralized buying. Waters' track record is the opposite: he scaled brands that refused to play the mass game and won anyway.

Our read: the hire is a bet on category creation, not channel expansion

The tell isn't the executive's resume. It's the timing and the category focus. The company brought Waters in right after acquiring Made by Nacho and naming Bobby Flay, the brand's co-founder, as chief culinary officer. That's not the move you make if you're rationalizing SKUs and cutting to the bones that perform at mass velocity. That's the move you make when you think the premium cat category is still wide open and you can own it by out-teaching the customer.

Waters said it plainly: premium options in cat haven't caught up to how much pet parents love their cats. The health-conscious pet owner is as careful about what's in their pet's bowl as they are about their own plate, and cat is where that gap is widest. If that's true, the play isn't distribution breadth. It's product depth, storytelling, and margin discipline that lets you stay premium while your competitors race to the middle.

The risk in our read: we're wrong if I and love and you announces a Walmart or Target rollout in the next six months, or if the brand starts cutting SKUs and simplifying packaging to hit a lower price point. If that happens, this was the professionalization hire everyone thought it was, and we misread the strategy. But the evidence right now points the other way.

What changes on the shelf Monday

If you stock I and love and you or Made by Nacho, don't pull back on reorders waiting for the new CEO to rationalize the line. The hire suggests the opposite: more SKUs, more storytelling, and a brand that thinks it can win by going deeper into premium rather than wider into mass. The question for your shelf isn't whether the brand is about to pivot. It's whether your cat section is set up to sell the story they're about to tell harder.

If you're a buyer at a natural or specialty chain, this is the call to make before your rep does: ask what's coming in cat, what the culinary angle looks like with Flay involved, and whether the brand has capacity to support demos or sampling that actually moves premium cat food. The brands that win the next three years in this category won't be the ones that cut to the price Chewy will take. They'll be the ones that teach the customer why the premium option is worth it, and this hire says I and love and you thinks it can out-teach the room.

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