Kibble… The Superfood?
Pet Tech — Breaking into the Industry. The first of a three-part series of our journey into pet nutrition and technology.
Part I: How we got here. Two years ago my co-founder, Turk Sapta, launched Level Up Meals, a prepackaged fresh meal delivery service in San Diego. Level Up is a subscription service to paleo food — often referred to as the “caveman diet” — a very simple form of eating, high in protein and veggies, free from grains, white carbs, refined sugars, legumes and dairy. It’s the type of food and service geared toward athletes, cross-fitters and the growing community of health-conscious individuals looking for a convenient way to eat healthy. During the launch, I discovered CrossFit myself and experienced the benefits, both physical and mental, of combining high-intensity workouts with clean eating. Cutting out unnecessary carbs and sugars changed my life drastically. And clearly the lives of those subscribing to Level Up’s paleo meals as well. Their business concept was simple — make fresh food for athletes and bring it directly to their gym. From day 1, they had positive cash flow, a steadily increasing number of partners and many happy customers.
Shortly after the company launch, Atum, Turk’s then 12-year-old Doberman’s health began deteriorating, and oddly rather quickly. Though he’d been living on home cooked food most of his life, circumstances caused Atum to be fed kibble from the bag for about a year. Intrigued by the benefits I and many others received from clean eating, we wondered feeding Atum something better than kibble could help, even at his late age. We are not the same species, but it’s not rocket science that providing a living organism with the nutrients necessary to thrive and function at its maximum potential could help treat ailments and prevent future diseases. More on his progress later.
I started with researching when people began eating unprocessed and organic foods, etc., and that’s when I learned about raw feeding for pets. We watched every educational and evolutionary documentary about dogs and wolves, and read every book on canine nutrition and raw feeding. In the early 2000s, the human food revolution gained momentum towards wholesome, unprocessed foods and away from canned and fast foods in the U.S. Little did I know, many other developed countries were already decades ahead of us with regard to pet and human foods. In the mid-90s, a small group of veterinarians in Australia actively promoted feeding real food, revolutionizing or bringing back, rather, the way people fed their pets. There were various methods for the feeding practice, raw meaty bones, BARF, evolutionary nutrition, etc., but they all had one thing in common — the inclusion of wholesome, real meat and bones that mimicked the nutrition and texture of a wolf’s diet, the domesticated dog’s ancestral counterpart.
I had no experience in the field. In fact, unlike Turk who grew up with several dogs, I never had a dog growing up and had little to reference. But the results of my cursory research quickly revealed some ugly truths about the pet food industry. I was baffled by the ingredients in most commercial dog food. I knew these foods in excess were not generally good for humans. And if you were feeding kibble, it was the same crap everyday — corn, grains, soybean meal, and even worse, artificial flavors and chemical preservatives like ethoxyquin, butylated hydroxyanisole and hydroxytoluene and other shit you can’t pronounce.
We contacted the Head of Nutrition at the National Zoo and visited the Colorado Wildlife and Wolf Sanctuary to learn more about wolves, the evolution of dogs, canine anatomy and diet. We discovered that dogs evolved from wolves 15,000 years ago and were eating mostly raw meat and human scraps much like wolves, their ancestral cousins, and that kibble was only invented 150 years ago with the advent of the industrial revolution… around the same time humans started eating spam, corned beef, Cheetos and other processed foods. If you want to learn more about the history of dog food, check out our timeline on www.realpetfood.com/feedreal
In fact, kibble is very much like Cheetos. “To meet nutritional requirements, pet food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat. Cats and dogs are not grain eaters by choice.” Pet food makers must then hire palatability experts to create a palatant to spray on kibble making it more enticing to dogs and cats, so they actually want to eat the food. If you’ve ever offered a dog a piece of real meat, you know you don’t have to add anything to make them want to eat it.
If kibble really is a superfood and tastes amazing… then why don’t they make it for humans?
According to kibble companies, they are formulated to fit the digestive system, provides essential proteins, vitamins and nutrients, promotes shiny coats and cleans teeth, plus has a shelf life of a year! If kibble is such a superfood, then why the hell hasn’t some form of kibble been designed for humans to carry around in our pockets and thrive off of??
spoke at length about this with Tom Lonsdale, a pioneer of the worldwide raw feeding movement, in Sydney. He describes commercial pet food as “junk food,” poisoning our pets and actively compares feeding kibble to feeding fast food every day. And he isn’t the only reformed veterinarian acknowledging that he was deceived in his vet school classes into thinking that commercial pet food was the best food for pets. Fellow raw feeder, Dr. Billinghurst admits, “We had been taught that commercial pet food was the ultimate in pet nutrition” but that over time “it had become clear to me that processed pet foods, not only did not promote good health, they produced positively bad health…” And it gets worse… Lonsdale has been fighting for years to uncover secret deals between big pet food manufacturers like Colgate-Palmolive and Mars and veterinary schools in an effort to understand how the nutritional curriculum for veterinarians is funded. Finally, he’s made some interesting headway.
We traveled to Australia and Canada, and spoke with veterinarians in the U.K. and all over the U.S. to understand how the pet industry got here. My conclusion thus far is: kibble makers are creating a super healthy cracker that tastes much like nothing so they have to add an artificial “meat” flavoring to make it dogs want to eat it. Veterinarians actively promote kibble because their nutritional classes are funded by kibble manufacturers and they don’t know any better to question their education or they get a kickback from kibble companies for marketing their products.
Is it just me or is this strangely reminiscent of the pharmaceutical industry?
It has been a good 20+ years since the real food for dogs revolution and while there are numerous scientific articles on kibble published by universities, there is not one scientific paper on raw feeding. As Mike Maslanka, Head of Dept. of Nutr. Science of the National Zoo confirmed, scientific studies on feeding dogs raw food are limited. Perhaps companies funding pet nutrition trials only release results of studies that are favorable to them. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence shared within raw feeding communities around the world and after our research it all seemed like common sense to me. But we wouldn’t be convinced until we tried it. After a 3 week transition to raw food, Atum was almost like brand new. This 12-year-old Doberman was running around like a puppy again. OK, his irritability and geriatric tendencies were still very visible, but now so was his ability to jump on couches, run down in the park and even walk up stairs, which he hadn’t been able to do in over a year.
So…how did we get here, you ask? Feeding Atum a raw diet had obvious benefits, but finding diverse ingredients and the time to make each of his meals was beyond doable. If you feed raw or ever looked into it, you know it’s not like you just throw a bunch of meat in a bowl. There are a bit of calculations involved and frankly, it is a dirty job. (Cue Mike Rowe handling green tripe.) Literally, I spent an entire week planning, sourcing from multiple grocers and preparing food to last only 3 weeks. We honestly thought, it shouldn’t be this hard to feed real food! We had Level Up’s business model in mind and we knew we had an opportunity to bring real food for dogs to the market. With a little bit of capital we had on the side, Real Pet Food was born.
We see that unprocessed food awareness is finally growing in the American dog community. We also see that there is a major hurdle that we face as dog owners to finding scientific research to back recommendations from qualified veterinarians about what we should be feeding our pets. Our values of food are simple. If you wouldn’t eat it, then why should your dog? If it comes out of an extruder, it’s probably not good for you or your dog.
To help dog owners facing this same obstacle, we decided to start an easy to manage subscription service for dog treats made from real food. It’s simple: real food for your dog, sent conveniently to your home.
Want to chat? ruby@realpetfood.com / Ruby Balaram
Stay tuned for Part II of our journey where we’ll discuss how we’re leveraging research & technology to transform the way people feed their pets.
