How Grocery Data Can Be A Powerful Tool For Pet Insurance Marketing

Forbes

10-07-2025

Jon Jacobson is CEO of privacy-preserving data collaboration platform business Omnisient.
Pet insurers today operate in an environment shaped by privacy regulations, declining third-party data access and increasingly cost-sensitive consumers.
As traditional methods of identifying and engaging pet owners are becoming less effective, more companies are finding grocery shopping data to be a compelling alternative: a high-frequency, real-world signal that reflects real intent and enables timely, relevant engagement.
The Behavioral Signals Of Pet Food
Grocery data can help to accurately detect pet ownership. The presence of recurring purchases like dog food, cat litter or even specialty pet treats across a loyalty card dataset signals the presence of a pet in the household. It helps reveal not just pet ownership, but also pet type, size and even life stage. (Think kitten formula or senior dog supplements.)
In marketing, timing is everything. Most insurers don't know someone is a pet owner until they fill out a form or respond to an ad. Grocery data, on the other hand, helps detect pet ownership from day one or even earlier.
When someone starts buying puppy food, a dog bed or dog toys, they've probably recently adopted a dog. Reaching a consumer with a personalized insurance offer in the first few days of pet ownership can increase conversion rates and cement brand loyalty before competitors do.
Unlike datasets that degrade over time or rely on once-off interactions, grocery purchases occur weekly (even daily) and offer a dynamic and current view of customer behavior. This helps pet insurers track lifestyle changes, refine pricing and underwriting using real-world behavior and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities continuously.
• New Pet: Sudden purchases of kitten or puppy products
• Life Stage: Transition to senior food or health supplements
• Budget Consciousness: Shift from premium to budget or store-brand products
• Onboarding Offers: Discounts for new pets, multi-pet coverage
• Wellness Add-Ons: Recommend preventative or holistic coverage options
• Flexible Support: Payment relief or loyalty benefits for financially stressed customers
These personalized, timely interventions can help build trust and emotional connection that turn transactional policyholders into loyal, long-term customers.
Challenges And Pitfalls Of Grocery-Based Targeting
While grocery data offers a promising window into pet ownership, it's not without its potential challenges. To use it effectively, insurers must understand its limitations and develop methods to overcome them.
Accessing grocery data in a privacy-compliant and secure manner is critical. Grocery data resides with retailers, requiring insurers to collaborate without breaching consumer privacy. Ensuring that insights are shared and modeled without exposing personally identifiable information (PII) is critical, which I'll discuss more in the following section.
Consumer perception and trust must also be considered. Even when data is anonymized, some consumers may feel uneasy receiving a pet insurance offer shortly after adopting a dog or cat. Transparency, clear opt-in mechanisms and value exchange messaging (e.g., 'We use anonymous shopping behavior to offer more relevant coverage options') are essential to ensuring consumers feel informed and respected. For additional guidance on how to use grocery data ethically and avoid missteps, see our recent piece on the ethics of consumer data.
Another nuance is the lack of context which can lead to false positives. For example, a shopper might buy dog food for a neighbor or a household may be fostering a pet temporarily. This makes it essential for insurers to combine grocery signals with other indicators such as frequency, recency and breadth of pet-related purchases to build higher-confidence models.
In short, grocery data is powerful but should not be used in isolation. By pairing it with robust governance, transparent practices and technical safeguards, insurers can tap into its potential responsibly and effectively.
Connecting The Dots With Privacy In Mind
Successfully leveraging grocery data begins with internal readiness. Insurers should start by examining their own first-party data for behavioral signals of pet ownership drawn from existing pet policyholders. Indicators such as prior claims activity, lifestyle product purchases or engagement patterns can be used to build or refine predictive models to identify similar signals across the broader customer base.
Next, explore compliant partnerships with grocery retailers or their retail media networks to reach relevant audiences. There are a couple of ways to do this:
Securely overlapping anonymized policyholder data with a grocery retailer via a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform enables both parties to analyze shared behavioral patterns without ever exchanging PII. This allows the insurer and the retailer to build predictive models and segment audiences to identify likely pet owners while maintaining full compliance with data privacy regulations.
Running campaigns through the retailer's media network allows insurers to reach anonymized pet-owning segments curated by the retailer without needing direct access to the data.
Licensing second-party data through a trusted partner such as a pet store, pet-focused app or another pet-affiliated business via a data clean room can provide a secure and compliant way to test and implement pet-owner targeting strategies using already opt-in, privacy-compliant data.
In all cases, running a proof-of-concept first allows insurers to validate results, optimize targeting strategies and ensure transparency and trust remain at the center of any new data initiative.
The Secure, Privacy-Compliant Way Forward In Precision Marketing
Grocery purchase data provides a rare combination of behavioral precision, recency and scale that offers insurers a way to understand and connect with pet owners and engage earlier in the customer journey. As insurers look for ways to improve both acquisition and retention, customer insights gained from grocery shopping data in a secure and privacy-compliant environment may just be the next big thing in pet insurance marketing.
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