Dom Ronga

Dom Ronga is the founder and CEO of Phoenix Bioscience, an animal health company building clinically grounded nutritional products for working and companion dogs under its Gun Dog Performance Company brand. He spent more than thirty years in pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

Phoenix did not come out of a boardroom. It came out of thirty years in a duck blind. Ronga has hunted waterfowl for more than three decades, from the early teal season through the last frozen mornings in January, long enough to know that the hardest part of the morning is almost always the dog work. For just as long he has trained his own gun dogs, retrievers for waterfowl and upland work alike, most of them British Labradors. The British lines suit the way he hunts and the way he trains: calm, biddable, quiet in the blind, and tractable enough to be handled at distance without noise or force. A dog that can do both, all season, is the standard he trains to.

That standard is what Phoenix is built around. The dogs that work the hardest are the ones that give up the most — condition, hydration, digestion, recovery between hunts — and the products Ronga could buy for them never matched the products he wanted. So he built them, with the same evidence requirements he spent a career applying in human medicine.