Inna Shekhtman is a woman on a mission. Since 2004, the Vancouver-based pet food entrepreneur has been making and selling raw and frozen dog and cat foods and treats with human grade meat.
However, with millions in new private funding and hiring a veterinarian, Shekhtman now aims to increase sales, enter new markets, and shake up the Canadian pet food industry with his niche brand of sustainable fresh produce and a faith Unwavering in its ability to improve the health and longevity of animals.
“Variety is the spice of life,” said Shekhtman, co-founder and CEO of Red Dog Deli Raw Food. “However, there is a lack of variety in regular pet foods, which are highly processed. We are here to provide healthy, natural food for pet owners and the guidance and support they need to make a dietary transition to live their best lives and age gracefully. “
Services
Headquartered in Port Coquitlam, a 20-minute drive east of Vancouver, the company makes four products with around 50 varieties within those lines, from frozen meals and whole bones to treats and supplements, under the Red Dog Blue Kat label.
The company also offers a wide range of ancillary services online, including a portion calculator, a food guide, and a vet finder. Provides fee-based consultation services ranging from personalized diets and lifestyle plans for pet owners new to raw foods or those with pets with health concerns such as food sensitivities or allergies.
Since August, those services are supported by Jules Mantler, an Australian-born veterinarian and animal nutritionist with 16 years of experience.
“Their role is to help pet parents transition to raw food and better understand their pets, formulate new products and review current formulations, conduct nutritional research and assist with the development of new educational content,” said Shekhtman. “She is also working to connect with other vets who are open to fresh food diets and build a network that can help pet owners.”
Capital investment
The new hire comes on the heels of a strategic partnership that Red Dog Deli Raw Food signed in April with Forage Capital Partners, a $ 100 million Canadian growth capital fund that focuses on companies with disruptive products and business models in value. of the agricultural and food industry. chains
Under the terms of the agreement, Calgary-based Forage and three pet food industry experts, John Hart, Scott Doyle and Edmund O’Keefe, will provide $ 3.5 million in financing and professional assistance to help drive and guide the Shekhtman’s plans to expand his business. paw print in the pet food industry.
“We are proud to partner with the passionate Red Dog team in their growth strategy,” said Steven Leakos, one of Forage’s four partners, when the partnership was announced. “Raw diets are a rapidly growing segment of the North American pet nutrition market (and) we are excited about the opportunity to harness the momentum that retailers are seeing in Canada through continued innovation in both product formats. as of packages “.
For his part, US pet food executive and investor John Hart called Red Dog Deli “a unique and highly differentiated brand in the raw products category,” and said he embraces Shekhtman’s vision and mission of provide better fresh nutrition solutions using high-quality and sustainably sourced products. ingredients
Red Dog Blue Kat manufactures raw and frozen dog and cat food and treats with human grade meat. Photos courtesy Red Dog Blue Kat
the origin story
For Shekhtman, 43, the association marks a new milestone in his decades-long quest to make a difference in the health and well-being of domestic pets by developing minimally processed whole foods based on ancestral nutritional needs. of the animals.
That journey began in the late 1980s when the entire Shekhtman family immigrated to Canada from Russia and settled in Edmonton. After graduating from the University of Alberta with a degree in computer science, she moved to Vancouver to work as a software engineer at MacDonald Dettwiler.
She brought the family dog, a retriever who soon died of an unexplained illness that caused severe inflammation.
“I felt very guilty,” Shekhtman recalled. “We tried the surgery but it didn’t help. To this day, I think the dry kibble from the pet store that I fed him contributed to his illness. “
By then, Shekhtman was volunteering at an animal shelter in Richmond, where she adopted a one-year-old Irish wolfhound she named Adhara. She soon met a small group of women who were clients of raw food vet advocates. “I used my research skills to learn about nutrition and the negative effects that processed foods can have on people and animals and the benefits of eating fresh food,” Shekhtman said. “One day it all clicked and it all made sense.”
In 2004, Shekhtman and a half dozen people at the dog park made some test batches of raw food with a blender in a kitchen and gave it to their pets. “In just two weeks I saw incredible changes in Adhara,” Shekhtman said. “He was a puppy again. His energy level skyrocketed, his poop got smaller and less smelly, and his teeth lost their tartar and turned pearly white. “
Soon, Shekhtman, her husband Kevin Plimbley, two of the women in the group, and another couple rented a warehouse, meat grinder, refrigerator, freezer, and other equipment needed to produce enough raw food to feed their pets and sell to others. pet owners. .
“It started out as a weekend gig, but it started to grow like crazy,” Shekhtman said. “We started making four or five formulas and selling them through stores and by word of mouth.”
From the beginning, the formulas from the fledgling company that the partners called Red Dog (Blue Kat was added to the name years later when they started making cat food) were similar to those eaten by animals in the wild hundreds of years ago. Dog foods, for example, have one of a dozen different proteins including beef, chicken, turkey, lamb and buffalo, and are 75% muscle, organ and bone meat and 25% vegetables organic in juice.
Cat foods contain 98% muscle meat, organs and bones, and 2% organic vegetable juice.
“Dogs and cats are biological creatures like us,” Shekhtman said. “Your cells require nutrition and your digestive system, like ours, is designed to process things that are simple and complete and that have not been turned into something else or over-processed.”
From secondary hustle to full time
Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Shekhtman quit her job and took the raw pet food company full-time as the sole owner.
With $ 10,000 of his own money, he established the business first in a small facility on Mitchell Island in Richmond, then on the fourth floor of a Save On Meats manufacturing building on Hastings St. in an older area of Vancouver.
He spent five years there, selling about $ 700,000 a year worth of products through pet food stores.
After moving to two larger locations in North Vancouver – the second, a 7,000-square-foot facility plagued with major structural problems that depleted his cash and caused him endless headaches and heartaches for six years – Shekhtman relocated Red Dog Raw. Deli in a new custom-built factory in Puerto Coquitlam in 2018.
“It helped us scale and reach our growth goals,” he said. “In year 1 we reached our estimate for year 3, which was $ 3 million.”
The new 12,000-square-foot building is HACCAP certified and equipped with state-of-the-art equipment for the meat industry, including two mixer grinders, a portioning machine, a vacuum sealer, and multiple freezers.
“We are 100 percent frozen,” Shekhtman said. “We do the tempering to go through the machinery, then the processing room where we mix, grind and pack the product before it goes into a blast freezer.”
His company has two reefer trucks for deliveries to the Lower Mainland region of BC. Products destined for the Western Provinces and Ontario are shipped via third-party refrigerated carriers.
According to Shekhtman, the company is now making more than $ 4 million in sales. Its customer base includes 6,000 pets, approximately 70 percent of them are dogs. “Cats make up only 30 percent, but their numbers are growing rapidly,” Shekhtman said. “It’s understandable because cats benefit more from raw food than dogs.”
Her goal now, she added, is to continue to produce high-quality raw food and help people learn and transition to raw food the way she did.
“We offer a holistic diet designed for cats and dogs at different stages of their lives,” Shekhtman said. “You can’t just keep giving your pets the same processed things that are neither natural nor healthy all the time. That’s what the regular pet food industry is all about. But we believe that the raw is where it is ”.