We started because
of one bad bag.

In 2021 our dog Mabel came up in hives. It took a vet, an elimination diet and six weeks to work out that the culprit was a bag of training treats with nineteen things on the panel, four of which were listed only as numbers.

We went looking for a treat with one ingredient on it and could not find one made here. Plenty of bags said Australian on the front and Made from local and imported ingredients in six point type on the back. So we bought a small dryer, rang an abattoir outside Ballarat, and made our own.

That is still the whole idea. The training treats are kangaroo. The cat bites are salmon. The supplements have more than one thing in them, because they have to, so we print the dose of each active on the front of the jar instead of hiding behind a proprietary blend.

Where the meat comes from

Kangaroo is wild harvested in western Victoria and New South Wales under the state management programs, and it arrives at us as the same grade of meat that goes to restaurants. Salmon is farmed in Tasmania. Both come from suppliers we have visited, which is a low bar that a surprising number of pet brands cannot clear.

How we dry it

Slowly, and not very hot. Meat is sliced, laid on racks and held at a low temperature for around fourteen hours until it is down to nine per cent moisture. That is dry enough to sit in a cupboard for two years without a preservative, and gentle enough that it still smells like meat when you open the pouch. Nothing is sprayed on afterwards.