The Honest Kitchen - pet food with a passion

As you may know, we’re coming up on our ten year anniversary here at The Honest Kitchen and to kick off the celebrations, I’ll be doing interviews, with some of our original customers. To begin the series, below are the notes from a chat I had recently with Judy McElvy, who’s been a customer since 2002.

1. Please tell us a little bit about your pets (please include their ages) Our THK pioneer was our (then) 11-year-old Boston Terrier Wiggy.

“Before THK, we’d fed her very high quality kibble her entire life. She’d done pretty well on it, but her skin seemed to always be a little dry and itchy, and her lovely eyes were often watery. She was diagnosed with Cushings Disease around age 10, and I started looking for ways to help her without resorting to the standard Cushings medications. I tried to feed raw food for a while, but found it difficult and expensive for just one little dog – I didn’t have a lot of freezer space, and couldn’t really buy in bulk. So I started looking for a viable alternative to raw, and found the THK website. I’d never heard of dehydrated dog food before, but decided to try it. We haven’t looked back. Wiggy loved the food right from the first meal, and it did wonders for her skin, eyes, and coat. Her Cushings symptoms abated and she had a good quality of life again until she passed away at 13. I credit THK with giving us more good years with her. Our current dogs – our nearly nine year old standard poodle Gem and 2 year old French Bulldog Hank – have never eaten any other purchased food. They eat THK Force supplemented with raw chicken and turkey. They have terrific muscle, coats, skin, teeth, and eyes, and haven’t ever seen the vet for anything other than puppy check-ups (and the occasional titer). They are very happy dogs, and THK is a big part of why they are so healthy.”

2. Which are their favorite THK products, and how do you think your cat or dog would describe our foods to his friends?

“Force is the one we use most often, though we’ve also tried Embark and Preference. All are good; I just prefer Force because I know it is always balanced for them, even on nights when I’m out of raw meat to supplement. How would they describe the food? Well, Gem would be the more articulate one – she’d say that it tastes really good, though she prefers it with just a wee bit less water than called for on the box. If you asked the question of Hank before a meal, he would say he was too hungry to think about answering. If you asked him while he was eating, he wouldn’t be able to hear your question over his enthusiastic gobbling. If you asked him again after he finished eating, he would feign a quizzical look and say ‘what food? Did I eat already? If I did, I’m still hungry, so feed me and ask me again later.’”

3. Did you ever heard any strange comments from your vet or friends, when they heard you were feeding this new type of food?

“Yes yes and yes. Various extended family members have made fun of me for years for not feeding kibble, saying they wouldn’t spend so much time fixing their dog’s food (?!?!), saying that the food looks “gross,” and saying they “feel sorry” for my dogs for having to eat such “gruel.” Whatever. I always give samples of THK to my friends and family when they get a new dog (or cat). My mother-in-law actually started feeding THK to her little Havanese (after years of teasing me about my “weird” food!!!), and now seems to feed mostly cooked chicken supplemented by THK Force. A couple of my friends also now feed THK to their dogs too.”

4. Do you have any funny experiences with dealing with The Honest Kitchen (either the food itself or the company!) from the old days?

“Well, when I first started buying THK for Wiggy, my husband teased me about buying such “expensive people food” for our dog (in truth, THK is worth every penny, especially given its quality and the fact that we spend much less at the vet’s than we otherwise would). So for April Fools Day that first year, I mixed a little THK with some felaful mix and cooked up some falafel balls and gave them to him. I said something like “the falafel mix smelled a little different than usual – do you think the felafels smell okay? He sniffed the plate and said they smelled fine to him, and proceeded to pile them on his salad. I told him the truth just before he ate one, and we laughed about the fact that I was now feeding him dog food.”

5. Do you have any top tips for preparing, introducing or otherwise using The Honest Kitchen, that a newbie might find useful?

“I started all my dogs on THK “cold turkey” and had good results. The key to mixing the food, obviously, is to make sure your ratio of water to food is correct. Too much water makes the food too soupy, and too little makes it too dry. I stopped measuring the water long ago, and now just “eyeball” the food as I add water, but sometimes I put in too much/too little water, and the food can get too soupy or too dry. Though they will still eat it, my dogs are a bit like Goldilocks – they prefer their Force “just right.” I also find that using filtered water is best – with plain tap water, Gem’s eyes can still get a little “goopy” on occasion, but filtered water (we use a Brita filter) eliminates that problem altogether.”

Hello,

If you’re anything like us, your Kitchen is probably the room in your home where most of the interesting stuff happens – the delicious culinary creations, of course – and hopefully some great kitchen-table conversations or even the occasional party. Our kitchen isn’t just part of our name – it’s where many of our great ideas occur – the hub of our communications, and it’s often filled with love, raucous laughter, the whiff of home cooking and of course, the dogs, all wanting to take part in the taste tests.

Last week, our kitchen was the location for our bi-monthly Peticures (for the office pups of course!) by our favorite pink-haired dog pedicures lady, Tess! This week, it was the site of some informal staff chats over cupcakes as well as some fun R&D brainstorming for a very exciting new treat. Next month, it’ll host a staff seminar on homeopathic remedies for pets. It’s just one of those rooms!

Kat, in our customer service department, had a great idea the other day – to send out a ‘State of the Kitchen’ memo to our customers, to make sure you’re in the loop on what else is going in our Kitchen these days. After all, you’re a pretty big part of our family and even though we can’t invite you all to our kitchen, we want you to know that you’re the focus of our decisions (and many of you do have a presence in our kitchen – just take a look at our fridge!).

Our Kitchen Fridge (Please excuse Charlie the Dalmatian, he's an Attention Seeker)

As you may know, we took on a very small amount of outside investment from two fabulous boutique firms last year. We remain a majority family owned company (I’m still the girl in charge) and we’re very much responsible for all our own day to day decisions.  The investment dollars we brought in are allowing us to create new jobs in several departments – we may add as many as twelve new employees this year, in the office and the field.

With investments in several other like-minded companies like Plum Organics, Public Bicycle, evol Burrito, HerbPharm, Wild Planet Foods and Big Tree Farms, it’s fantastic to be able to brainstorm with our new ‘family’ of companies who love their customers just as much as we do . Our investors are also enabling us to explore some rather cool new ingredients including new sustainable, fair-trade and organic options. We can’t tell you too much right now, but promise to share some details as soon as we can.

Speaking of ingredients, you may already know that The Honest Kitchen doesn’t use ANY food ingredients from China. We remain steadfast to this commitment, although it’s not without its challenges. To be completely honest, zucchini is in extremely short supply this year (due to farmers replacing zucchini crops with other produce and a generally poor harvest) and because we refuse to use Chinese options, we’ve decided to swap our zucchini out for Pumpkin, another squash-type veggie that’s packed with valuable phytonutrients and is very gentle even on sensitive tummies.

We’d already elected to begin using Pumpkin in place of green beans in Zeal due to popular demand from our customers who’ve been using the Zeal recipe for their sensitive pets. That change is happening on the upcoming Jan/Feb production run. If your next box of Zeal says Pumpkin, that’s what’ll be in the box. If it still lists green beans, then green beans are on the inside, too. You can always trust our labels.

By the way, thank you, if you took the time to share your opinion on pumpkin, via a survey or Facebook Poll. We appreciate it very much and had an overwhelming response from customers (88 to 1 in fact) who voted Yes on Pumpkin!

If you’re a Preference fan, you may have noticed a slight change in the order of ingredients on our Preference labels. This reflects a very slight amendment to the ratios of some ingredients to help make Preference a little less strong-tasting! A 1% or even 0.5% change to more or less of a couple ingredients in the mix can really shuffle up the order on the label. As always, the formula itself is reflected on the box.  We’ve had lots of great feedback on the consistency of the Preference recipe – thank you if you’ve shared yours. We don’t have any other changes planned and as always, promise to tell you if something does have a minor amendment of some kind.

Hopefully you’ve already seen our brand new kraft boxes, which are produced from a combination of recycled material and SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) certified paperboard. We’re making a few minor adjustments to the ink on the next production run, to help make sure our colors pop on the kraft. We hope you like the style of the new boxes and have found them easier to understand, with the front ‘motif’ and clearer directions on the back. Please let me know what you think!

Even though our boxes look a bit different, please be assured that the quality and integrity of the recipe on the inside, is unchanged, with the exception of the minor changes to pumpkin (now in Zeal and coming soon in Force, Preference and Prowl), and the ingredient percentage adjustments in Preference noted above, our foods and formulations are just the same as before. We have a new look on the outside, but it’s the same good stuff on the inside!

We’re also planning an upgrade, that will enable you to see our QC test results online soon, too. We’re all about transparency and are very excited to be able to share this info with you, so you’ll be able to look up the results of any batch of food you have, up to one year after production. We hope to have this live in the next month or so. Stay tuned!

We love to chat to our customers. If you have something you’d like to share, please do let us know. If it’s something you’re not happy about, we’ll take it to heart, and see if we can make it right or even implement a change (as long as it’s something others want, too) and if it’s something we’ve done that made you smile – or better yet, made a positive difference in your pet’s life, please tell us that too. You never know, we might even do a little dance on our kitchen table, to celebrate.