The Farmer’s Dog taps into the future of dog food with meal delivery

My dog Nubs tears into a
shipment from his new pet-food supplier, The Farmer’s
Dog.
Melia Robinson/Business
Insider

• The Farmer’s Dog is a personalized meal delivery
  service that’s most easily described as “Blue Apron for
  dogs.”
• Tech investors are throwing money at the Brooklyn
  startup, which has raised a total of $11 million from Shasta
  Ventures, SV Angel, and others. They believe it’s the future of
  dog food.
• After feeding my dog The Farmer’s Dog food for almost
  two months, I can see why. My dog Nubs loves it.

---

 

I wouldn’t call my dog Nubs a picky eater. He eats the gross
stuff we pick from his eyes, pens, cardboard, mulch, and any
morsel of human food that falls off the table. He is, after all,
a growing boy.

But Nubs doesn’t like kibble. When I call him for breakfast, he
sniffs around his bowl, filled with brown balls of pulverized
beef and grains, and leaves it untouched. For a while, I resorted
to sprinkling cheese on his kibble just so he would eat it before
we head out the door. But I knew spoiling Nubs wasn’t the
solution.

Then we tried The
Farmer’s Dog. It’s a personalized meal delivery service
that’s most easily described as “Blue Apron for dogs.”

Eating your own dog food

Customers fill out a questionnaire that takes into account their
pet’s health and size, and order as many meals as they need for
the week. The food is sourced and produced to human-grade
standards, using USDA and FDA-inspected ingredients that the
company says is prepared in facilities with safety standards
usually reserved for human food. It ships in pre-portioned
baggies according to the dog’s nutritional needs.

Tech investors are throwing money at the Brooklyn startup, which
has raised a total of $11 million from Shasta Ventures, SV Angel,
and others. They’re betting that millions of dog-moms and
dog-dads want better for their pups, and they’re willing to shell
out for it.

“We’ve never doubted that this is the way that pet food is going
to be in the future,” said Jonathan
Regev, cofounder of The Farmer’s Dog.

The Farmer’s Dog customers
can see whole ingredients like parsnips, chickpeas, broccoli,
spinach, and carrots in every bag.
The
Farmer’s Dog

Regev and his cofounder, Brett Podolsky, got their start after
Podolsky’s dog, Jada, needed home-cooked food to stay healthy.
They started taking orders from friends and rented a commercial
kitchen in New York to prepare bigger and bigger batches. 

When they could no longer keep up with demand, Regev
and Podolsky went seeking venture capital to start a
business.

As it turns out, dogs are the perfect subscription customers.
They eat like clockwork and aren’t concerned with how the food
looks, though “it happens to look good, which is sort of a great
coincidence for us,” Regev said. Customers can see whole
ingredients like parsnips, chickpeas, broccoli, spinach, and
carrots in every bag.

I asked Regev how much dog food he’s personally eaten during
product testing.

“More than I want to admit in public,” he said.

The pet startup market is booming

The premium dog food market is starting to crowd with companies
like PetPlate, Ollie, and the newly launched YaDoggie — a dog
food delivery service that asks customers to prepare their dogs’
meals in an Instant Pot — that claim to provide higher quality
dog chow. And traditional pet care companies are worried. Just
this week, the world’s largest pet food manufacturer launched the

first startup accelerator and
venture fund focused on the future of pet care. 

Nearly $240 million in venture capital flowed into the
pet-related startup sector in the US in 2017, more than double
from the previous year of $104 million, according to PitchBook.

Kibble
is out.

Shutterstock

Regev said he isn’t worried about the growing competition,
because it only serves their mission of having more and more dogs
eat well.

“Our end goal is that most of the pet food companies are making
food like ours,” Regev said.

Nubs has been eating The Farmer’s Dog fare — in beef, pork, and
turkey variety packs — for almost two months. He comes running at
the sound of me squeezing the wet food into his bowl. As I lower
it onto his mat, Nubs looks up at me with those big, brown eyes
that I’d like to think say: “Thank you for making my dreams come
true.”

Call me a sucker, but I’m not alone. The company claims to have
delivered over one million meals since it launched in 2015.

It’s pricey

It’s worth mentioning: I really, really didn’t want Nubs to like
The Farmer’s Dog. Mainly because it costs a fortune. 

The standard meal delivery for Nubs, a one-year-old pit bull mix,
contains 14 days of food and comes out to $128, or $64 per week.

(Smaller dogs need less food, so their subscription costs much
less.)

That’s almost as much as my household grocery bill. I couldn’t
bear to spend that much. So, I talked with customer service
and created a custom plan: I order 14 days of food once
a month, instead of every two weeks, which averages $32
per week. I supplement his meal with two scoops of kibble, which
he eats so long as it touches the good stuff. Now Nubs
loves what I feed him — at a more reasonable cost.

Regev said it bothers him when people look at The Farmer’s Dog’s
product and say, “Oh, it looks fancy.” The food has recognizable
ingredients, sure, but it’s not intended to be a premium product.

“We really are just making simple, healthy food,” Regev said.
“And health is the whole point of what we do. It’s nothing to do
with spoiling your dog.”

He went on, “I think most companies are marketing to people to be
healthy, and we’re just trying to make sure that the food is
actually healthier and fresh. We’re not doing beef
bourguignon with foraged mushrooms and lamb from New Zealand,
that’s not our game.”

“Our beef recipe is called ‘beef recipe,'” Regev said.