Conducted June 13, 2024. Transcript edited for length and clarity.
Noelle: Today I’m chatting with Ilya Altshteyn, one of the co-founders of California Dog Kitchen. Let’s jump right in. You guys are doing so much interesting stuff. I’d love to find out more about how you found yourself here. Because everybody says, “it made my dog work better,” and then ta-da, there’s a pet food company. There’s a lot of yadda yadda in between that. How did you find yourself here? I’d love to hear that story.
Ilya: I can give you an overview. Like you said, fresh food was making my dog work better. And that was an important kind of launching point. That was the thing that started me cooking for her. But then I got lazy and decided to buy some cooked foods. It was weird because I didn’t really find very much of exactly what I wanted to see. I discovered some of the independent brands, but there’s just something missing with all of them, at least with everything that was broadly available four or five years ago when my brother and I were first coming up with this idea.
We figured out what we wanted to see from a gently cooked food brand and tried to do that. We focused on what we wanted to update compared to what we saw existing already out there, such as more usable and better packaging options. Packaging is a really big deal right now for sustainability reasons. And also for frozen food, it’s a really hard to use product. Very few other gently cooked brands are really doing a product format that works easily. Everybody just does it the cheapest way possible.
We wanted to get out of that and do something more sustainable. Everything is in plastic no matter what because otherwise it’s either super expensive to do or it’s just not out there. People aren’t doing it; it’s not broadly available. You can’t just go to a standard packaging manufacturer and get them to make something for you. It took us a couple years to get to the current format. We started with something like a cylindrical ice cream container. But there are pain points with this kind of thing. It takes forever to defrost and it's terrible for displaying and for space usage on the shelf. So we moved to the rectangular little paper tubs and eventually moved to these bags that you’ve probably seen on our website or maybe in person. They have the cubes in them.
The packaging and the product format making it easier to use and kind of better for the environment was a big thing. And then we wanted to do recipes that included some alternative proteins. We decided from the outset that we were going to be pretty small. We don’t have any ambitions of selling through Chewy or Petco or anything like that. We really just want to focus on those independent retailers that understand the value in our product and have customers who are coming to them for that sort of thing. That lets us do things like novel proteins that are not widely available.
The venison that we buy is available in pretty limited quantities because it’s literally wild hunted. A hunter has to go out to a ranch where the deer are roaming free and kill a deer and field process it. The venison was a big hit. We tried it and we realized that people really loved it and we loved it. So we released a couple more recipes like that that are really meant for smaller scale sales, like our wild caught fish because it’s just expensive. It’s available, but it’s expensive. And then our certified organic chicken, which comes from Mary’s Organic Chicken grown here in Southern California, is also going to be available in somewhat limited quantities. I don’t think we could make a product that gets into thousands of retailers and still be making it with Mary’s Chicken. It’s just not going to work.
Noelle: That’s kind of the perpetual challenge from a sourcing standpoint of wanting to use the best of the best. There’s only so much of it available. You’ll get companies making very broad claims that have a broad reach, and either they’re buying all of it and nobody else gets any, or eventually your claims aren’t going to be justified. It’s a road I’m familiar with and you have to be really conscientious of it. Hopefully as more people have the demand for the product, more suppliers are servicing that need. But it’s not the most efficient farming method, because that’s what factory farming is, which is why we’re in this terrible circumstance doing these terrible things to animals in the first place. But, everybody’s helping to push that in a better direction, which is awesome.
Ilya: Yeah. In my opinion, if you’re really trying to make the best thing, you can only, like you said, make a little bit of it. Once you try to make more of it, it starts to become less of the best thing. It can still be really good, but then the price has to go up or you have to get some really amazing economies of scale that are somehow magical.
Noelle: Right, so you’re buying some land and raising your own chickens at that point.
Ilya: We literally thought about just growing our own vegetables, even at a small scale. That’s kind of how we got into manufacturing. We started off making our own food. And then we realized that if we’re going to have a distributor and retailer between us and the consumer that either we have to reduce costs more at the beginning of the supply chain whereby we manufacture the food or produce some of the ingredients. Or we do our own distribution. We toyed around with both possible directions and ended up deciding to focus on the manufacturing. We invested in a big space last year and now we have a dog food kitchen, like a proper big dog food production facility.
Noelle: That’s awesome! How does that feel?
Ilya: It’s a little scary because we don’t come from a food processing background. My background is I did data science for like 8 to 10 years depending on what you count as part of that career. I did sustainability in coffee for a good chunk of that, about half. I was working for a non-profit that worked with coffee farmers and coffee companies on sustainability data. So now we’re bringing some of that past experience into this, but none of it was food processing experience. We had to make a lot of things up, work with consultants to understand better how to do stuff, and learn a lot.
Noelle: That’s incredible. There is a lot to learn. I always joke that you need the right amount of crazy to go into raw and fresh food manufacturing, especially doing it in a craft way. To make it consistent and repeatable is a difficult task. Kudos to you guys for just figuring it out.
Ilya: And we’re so much better at it than we were. I’m hoping in a year I can say that again.
Noelle: Tell me a bit about your vegetable sourcing.
Ilya: When it comes to produce, conventional doesn’t cut it. We’ve switched all of our produce to organic except blueberries and apples. We cannot find reasonably priced organic sources for those right now. But the long term plan is to make those organic too. All the rest of our produce is organic now, including our grains.
Noelle: And your packaging, how did you go about making it more sustainable?
Ilya: It’s actually compostable. It will break down in an industrial composting environment like where stuff goes when you put it in the green or brown bin. It has three layers. One of them is this outer paper layer that you can see on the outside. Then another is this foil-looking layer, but it’s actually more like a paper. It just happens to be a little bit reflective and it’s totally plant based. And then the inner layer is plant based plastic. It’s a plastic that is a little more fragile than petroleum-based plastic. If you put it into an industrial composting environment, it will break down into healthy soil without microplastics within 180 days. Probably a lot faster, but the standard is 180 days.
Our little paper tubs are actually the same material but in a very thin layer on the inside. Because it’s so minimal, I can have it break down into soil in my countertop composting machine in four hours.
Noelle: What?! Wow. Yeah, I saw the video on Instagram recently of the person tearing it apart and putting it in the bin.
Ilya: Yeah that was me tearing it apart. It’s magic. That little countertop composter, it mimics an industrial composting environment because it applies a tiny bit of heat. There’s a rotating arm in there that moves everything constantly. And then you throw in a tablet with bacteria that breaks up there.
Noelle: That’s incredible. So you inoculate it.
Ilya: Yeah, you put the fruit scraps and some packaging in there and the tubs break right down. These bags don’t break down in there fast enough for me to have the patience to do it. I’ve tried running it three times and it broke down a little bit, but three times is 12 hours. The standard is 180 days. I’m not going to run it 30-however many times. But it’s awesome.
The reason we did compostable and not recyclable is because recyclable is a little bit complicated when you have food waste on it. When there’s fat on the container, people have to wash it to properly recycle it. When we had these other containers, they were recyclable. But we realized that people weren’t going to rinse them. And even if they did, it wasn’t clear that they would rinse enough of the fats off to not contaminate the recycling stream. Usually stuff like that, food containers with food scraps on them, will get filtered out before the recycling actually happens
.
Noelle: That’s a really interesting distinction.
Ilya: My hope is that these don’t get filtered out from the composting pile, but I’m sure that in some cities they do. There are some cities that kind of don’t want to deal with it. They are not sure which things are legitimately going to break down and which ones aren’t. So they just have rules where basically anything that isn’t like a banana peel is getting tossed in the trash. But that will change over time. And there are also plenty of areas where it doesn’t work like that, where they have more advanced kind of filtering.
Noelle: That makes sense. For people like me who live on a farm and have compost bins that sit and process for a year, we could probably toss those right in.
Ilya: I’m pretty positive that our little tubs will break down in those. I don’t know if this bag would because you have to apply some beat, but there’s probably natural heat in there already. Do you have to turn it regularly?
Noelle: We just do kind of the lasagna method. We’ve got these probably four foot diameter fence rings that have multiple bins in. And my husband, he’s the soil management part of the partnership, he puts food scraps in. He puts green mulch in, leaves, sticks, all the biomass from the garden. And our chicken waste goes into them. I think churning it moves the process faster, but the heat develops all on its own anyway.
In the winter, we’ve seen those piles steaming. And we’ll move it once in the spring, probably put a couple of piles together, you know, because they settle like crazy. And by the time we’re planting the garden in the summer, it’s dirt.
Ilya: Yeah, that’s awesome. I believe in an industrial composting facility, it’s like a big tumbler. It’s just constantly slowly turning and under some heat. Maybe I’ll send you one of these someday and we can see how it breaks down.
Noelle: That would make for a long Instagram post! Now there was another thing on your website that I hadn’t heard of before. I’m intrigued, what is the Good Food Guild? Can you tell me about that?
Ilya: That one is something like a cooperative or club for human food. Portland Pet Food Company is the other pet food company that’s in it. Basically to join, they check that your sourcing complies with their standards. Those standards are all about sourcing either organic or the highest quality ingredients for whatever products you’re making. They promote slow food and sustainability in the food production space, but mostly for human foods. We really like what they’re doing and they connect us with a lot of other human food producers that are doing cool stuff that’s kind of inspiring to see. They do a conference a couple times a year that we could attend. I haven’t been yet but I always read through everything that happened. Someday we’ll attend. It’s like a little club. Most of the people there are producing something like fancy cheese or beer, or some other sort of snacks. I like it.
We’re actually a part of another organization that I keep forgetting to put anywhere. It’s called Naturally San Diego. It’s called Naturally San Deigo, but they have branches in every major city in the US. It’s a CPG (consume packaged goods) group that focuses on sustainability and better formulations for products. It’s kind of in the same category as the Good Food Guild where it’s a group that we’re a part of.
Noelle: That’s awesome. I think one of the biggest challenges for consumers or pet parents or anybody is just the tools of discernment for the brands in the landscape. It is easy to lie in this industry. And when there is incendiary news about brands doing bad things, people start looking for the deception everywhere. They need to have more tools to verify if a company is doing what they say they’re doing and to have the willingness to put that information out. Susan Thixton’s list is great because it’s one of the few resources that exist for pet parents. But it’s not as though every invoice from every raw meat supplier of every company is being reviewed. It’s still frequently a case of being shown what brands are open to showing you.
Ilya: Her list is good. But I agree that the checks are surface level.
Noelle: Indeed. It is far better than having no tools at all. Unfortunately there is no dog food police.
Ilya: Yeah, the sustainability company that I worked for, we were a verification company. It’s just behind the scenes verification. Coffee works in this very interesting way where there’s 12 million coffee farmers in the world. And then the big coffee companies buy from all these small farmers, but they don’t have any direct contact with the farmers because there’s a million middlemen. And so a company like Nescafe has no idea if there’s slave labor going on at the end of their supply chain, or if there’s banned pesticide use, or any kind of child or unfair labor practice of any sort (or any of these other sustainability issues). So we were the company that would investigate. And it’s very, very hard to do properly.
Noelle: Right, because they’re not like “sure, come on it, take a look.”
Ilya: Well they are, but you’re also there for half an hour or an hour. And that’s if you’re un-announced. If you’re announced, then you’re getting a full day, but you’re announced, you know? So the bigger coffee farm that you’re reviewing knows you’re coming. I’ve been on a few dozen of those visits and I’m very familiar with what the gaps are, with the things that get lost.
Noelle: It’s tough. That’s very interesting experience that you have in the sustainability realm. Now I know you have to go shortly, but before we close out I wanted to speak with you a little more on your sourcing. What are your sourcing standards? What does that look like for California Dog Kitchen?
Ilya: So all our vegetables, except blueberries and apples, we buy USDA Organic. We work with a distributor that specializes in organic. It’s called Charlie’s Produce. And eventually, when we get a little bigger, we’ll hopefully be able to buy directly from producers. But for now, we just work through the distributor. Same thing for our grains.
Four our meats, we have two lines of food. One is our wild and organic line. In that one we have the venison recipe which comes from Broken Arrow Ranch. They’re the ones I was telling you about before where they’re actually hunting deer and carving them up in a field trailer. They’re definitely our coolest sourcing story. Then we have our wild caught fish. We also just buy that through a distributor.
And then we have our organic chicken that we get through Mary’s. The cool thing about organic chicken is that it’s actually the entire recipe that is certified organic. The USDA actually monitors our purchases. They look through our purchasing logs. So they do the thing that Susan Thixton can’t do. And we pay them to do it, unfortunately, but that’s just how it works.
Noelle: Now are you guys a USDA facility?
Ilya: We have USDA organic certification. We don’t have a USDA human food production license, which are two different things.
Noelle: Okay, right, because you’re not producing human food.
Ilya: When a USDA organic inspector comes, they don’t care that we follow USDA human food production rules unless there are obvious infringements. They do care that we follow the USDA organic program rules. They check that we’re buying organic for our organic recipe. They check that we’re storing it properly such that they can’t get mixed up with non-organic stuff, that we use chemicals that are organic compliant for cleaning and for other stuff. We actually just adopted all of the organic standards for everything in our production. We just use those organic compliant chemicals for everything.
So our wild and organics line is this special sourcing where all the animals are happy animals and they’re all living their natural lives. And then we have our regular, conventional proteins. They are pretty conventional. Our standard for those is just it has to go through a human grade supply chain. It has to be something that can be sold at a supermarket or grocery store or a restaurant and it has to be preservative free, which we’ve always done. Sometimes you can buy meats with preservatives, like ground beef, and then you put it in your dog food and say you didn’t add preservatives.
Noelle: Mmm, got it. Right, you didn’t add them… It’s interesting how things can get obscured like that.
Ilya: So that’s kind of an overview of our sourcing standards. For the vegetables, 99% organic. For the meats, it really depends on which of the two sets of recipes we’re looking at. And yeah, the conventional ones we keep conventional for the sake of keeping the price reasonable.
Noelle: That makes sense. It’s getting that entry point. And then did I see that you source USA only proteins? Or does that vary?
Ilya: Yeah, all of the proteins come from the US. The fish is an exception because it’s from the ocean. But yeah, all of our proteins are from the US. We don’t have much motivation to even order stuff from abroad because if you order one pallet, you’re not going to save any money and we don’t have the room to store a container load.
Noelle: Gotcha, that’s awesome. Well Ilya, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much!
Ilya: Yeah, thank you Noelle! It’s really nice to meet you.
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