Our Story

Meet Sandy...

Sandy is a Labrador Retriever puppy living in Queensland, Australia and she is the inspiration for this project. It all started with...

Diarrhea

From 3 to 5 months she was fed an "ultra premium" brand of kibble. As a growing large-breed puppy she needs a lot of food and her kibble cost $6.50 per day. But for all the expense she was constantly getting diarrhea.

Her food smelled awful going in and even worse coming out, and I started to wonder what was really in it.

By the time she was 5 months old I was at my wits end with cleaning up the mess so I started making her homemade food instead. At least I knew what she was really eating. I began with boiled chicken and white rice (the "diarrhea diet") and after the diarrhea stopped I didn't want to go back to processed kibble.

Cooking delicious meals for others is my love language so I never felt good about feeding my best friend a bowl of smelly brown biscuits.

The research rabbit hole

I started researching dog nutrition to design a more balanced menu using a wider variety of ingredients. My goal was to match the cost of her kibble using quality human foods from my local supermarket, while ensuring she got the right calories, protein and other nutrients to grow and thrive.

Finding good nutrition information for dogs wasn't easy. There's plenty of nutrition data available for humans but not so much for dogs. Most of the information said not to feed your dog just homemade food because they wont get all the right nutrients and, if you do, you need to buy all kinds of supplements to add to their food. Many articles avoided giving specific advice and just said to consult your vet. But many vets make money from selling processed pet food in their clinics, so who can you really trust?

What exactly were these magic nutrients that dogs couldn't get from real food? And why were vets the custodians of all nutrition information for dogs? What did people do 100 years ago before we had pet food? It was starting to smell like a conspiracy.

As I dug deeper I learned dogs can indeed get the nutrients they need from real food, you just have to select the right foods. Dogs, especially growing puppies, need lots of omega-3 which you can get from fish. Some fish more than others. Canned tuna and salmon aren't so great - they would need large quantities to get enough omega-3; but sardines and mackerel are abundant in omega-3 oils.

Dogs also need calcium for bone growth and bone strength. They can get calcium from animal bones (and processed pet food often contains ground-up bones) but as it turns out egg shells are over 80% calcium. And egg shells are free since you would have thrown them away otherwise. If you bake the shells for a few minutes then pop them in a coffee grinder you have a free natural calcium supplement.

Food, glorious food

Sandy's three meals per day now look like this...

Breakfast Boiled eggs Sardines Brown rice Chopped spinach Powdered egg shell

Lunch Raw lamb Sweet potato Carrots Broccoli Blueberries

Dinner Cooked chicken thighs Brown rice Carrots Green peas Powdered egg shell

These meals total 1,500 calories (kcal) per day including 147 grams of protein and all the nutrients she needs to grow and be super healthy. Here's the amazing thing though - the cost is only $6.60 per day - around the same as 3 bowls of nasty-smelling kibble.

I also found that I wasn't alone. Many people don't feel good about feeding their best friend highly processed food and there are numerous fresh (or "raw" or "human-grade") pet food delivery companies popping up. Most of the founders of these companies started with a similar story to me: processed food was upsetting their dog's stomachs, giving them diarrhea, bad breath, allergies, itchy skin and other problems; so they turned to making homemade food instead.

But, rather than helping others to do the same, they all started more pet food companies. The thing is, fresh pet food delivery is super expensive. To feed a growing puppy like Sandy the average cost would be $16 per day. That's nearly $6,000 per year! Obviously shipping out food in boxes to people's doors isn't cheap. Why would you spend that much when you can just go to your local supermarket and buy fresh ingredients for half the cost? It doesn't take long to chop up some meat and veggies.

An App for that

During my journey I ended up with huge spreadsheets of foods, nutrients and calculations. I kept thinking “surely there must be a dog nutrition App that does all this for you?” but I couldn’t find one. A few Apps let you input what you had fed them to get nutrition info after the fact; but nothing designed a suitable menu for a dog, and knowing what foods to include in the first place is the critical part.

As there wasn't an App to create nutritionally balanced menus for dogs I decided to build one.

The goal of PetMenu™ is to take the mystery out of pet nutrition and make it easy for people to make delicious and healthy pet meals at home using fresh ingredients for the same cost as processed pet food.

I believe pets deserve healthier food, and their owners shouldn't have to break the bank to provide it. I'm starting a revolution.

Paul Wildy
PetMenu™ Founder