The Green Rocket

1. First of all, introduce yourselves and tell our readers a little bit about The Honest Kitchen. What does the business do? How and why did it get started? What is the vision behind it?

The Honest Kitchen produces a line of all natural, human-grade dehydrated foods for dogs and cats. Our products are made with hormone and antibiotic free meats, non GMO vegetables and fruits, plus certified organic whole grains, flaxseed, and kelp. We are in the process of also transitioning all our coconut and sesame usage to certified-organic.

The company was founded in my own kitchen in 2002, as a result of my quest to provide better food for my own puppy, Mosi, to eat. Once I had created a recipe that he approved of, I wondered if other people might be interested in it as well, so we built a web site, found a human-food facility to produce it and it snowballed! The vision was to create healthy, natural foods for dogs and cats with uncompromising attention to quality, production integrity and a commitment to the planet.

2. From the description of pet food production on your website, it sounds like The Honest Kitchen team is in control of all levels of the production process. How do you ensure that the ingredients and processes used are environmentally friendly?

We take full responsibility for purchasing all our raw ingredients from our individual suppliers. Dehydration itself has a number of environmental benefits, including the fact that it affords the products a 12 month shelf life without the need to use any harmful chemical preservatives, freezing or refrigeration. It also reduces packaging usage because a small 10 lbs box of food will hydrate to make about 43 lbs of fresh food when re-hydrated at meal time. The foods are compact and light weight to ship which helps to reduce fuel usage. We use as many local ingredients as possible.

3. How do you convince a consumer that buying buying eco-friendly foods for their pet is a step in the right direction? Many casual green supporters may not even consider this an option to begin with.

In fact we don’t find we have to do too much at all to convince people to use our foods. The vast majority of customers are already looking for a healthier alternative to the food they are currently feeding, or searching for a solution to a specific health problem that is related to poor diet. A high percentage of our customers follow an eco-conscious lifestyle for themselves, consume organic foods and since nowadays most people’s pets are true members of their families, they demand better products as a matter of course. Our finding has been that environmental awareness and a healthier lifestyle just transfers automatically to the needs of furry family members.

Our eco-friendly packaging (recycled, biodegradable paperboard printed with soy based inks and recyclable unprinted plastic bags) are definitely an additional incentive for some pet guardians to use our products, and part of our commitment to the environment, but for some customers, the value of our products is in the health of the animal, with the benefit to the environment being almost a happy side-effect.

4. You seem to only offer dehydrated pet food. Can you outline the benefits of dehydrated dog and cat foods vs. what a pet owner might buy in the store?

Dehydration means removing the water, and nothing else. Most vitamins, minerals, phyto-nutrients and many enzymes survive dehydration, making dehydrated food more nutritious than conventional cooked (kibble or canned) foods.

5. The pet food is advertised as “human grade”, can you explain what this means? The site mentions that the individual ingredients in the pet food are tested by humans!? Please elaborate!

Every single ingredient we buy is fit for human consumption; our ingredients also go for use in human foods like soups and so on. It is vitally important to us as a company that we never use ingredients that we ourselves could not eat.

Feed-grade (not for human consumption) ingredients can include some really horrible substances like by products (beaks, feet, feathers, husks, hulls, pomace) and chemicals, flavoring agents and other harmful substances which are neither nutritious nor healthy for our animal companions to eat. By insisting on all human-edible ingredients, we can insure that these things never make their way into our products and therefore keep quality and integrity in full focus.

We taste all our raw ingredients as part of our research and development process, when we are creating new recipes. We also taste finished products to ensure they meet our standards. We also have a pack of office dogs who eagerly participate in the taste tests!

6. It sounds like the Honest Kitchen is very involved in giving back to the community by supporting charities and related causes. The website mentions a charity of the month that receives a donation based on that month’s profits. How do you decide what kinds of charitable causes are able to receive this benefit?

For the most part, we decide on charities internally among our staff, based on causes that are important to specific people, world events that may be taking place, and so on. In addition, we accept ‘nominations’ by our customers and if a specific charity is very popular then we direct funds there for a month.

7. You run a supporting blog for The Honest Kitchen; can you tell our readers more about it. What came first: The marketing potential of having an interesting support blog, or the personal desire to blog about what you love?

The main idea behind the blog was as an auxiliary educational resource for our customers to read about issues relating to animal care, wellbeing, nutrition as well as slightly political issues on occasion (such as our stance on puppy mills). As time has gone on, we have included more ‘entertainment’ lighthearted commentary to balance things out, as well as starting to use it as a tool by which to support animal adoptions. We’re also adding validity to the content with our panel of ‘celebrity bloggers’ such as Ann Martin and Tracie Hotchner, who are respected authors, journalists and so on.

8. Are there any thoughts you’d like to leave with readers of The Green Rocket?

One of our primary focuses is on helping companion animal guardians understand the benefits of good nutrition – to see it as a cornerstone of total health. Many pet owners are led to believe that various health problems like chronic itchy skin, ear infections and GI upset in their pets are something they have to live with and resign themselves to a lifetime of prescription steroids, antibiotics and other medications when in fact a simple change in diet – either better quality food, elimination of excess grains, by-products and chemicals – can result in these problems clearing up completely. We’d like to open people’s minds to the idea that food can make a difference – in the health of the individual animal, and, through reduced packaging, toxins and by-products – in the world around us.

Creative Commons Attribution: “Dog Logic“, Flickr, Simon Davison

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