Duke's Delicious Dog Dinners

Everyone at Duke's is an animal lover and our animal companions all eat our product as their regular diet - even the cat, although she gets a slightly different formulation. Below is the whole story of how we came to be in the pet food home delivery business.

Why did we decide to get into this business? 

Duke (who really is our dog) was a "pound puppy" although no longer really a puppy as he was a year old old when he adopted us. Duke had had a pretty hard life and was malnourished and extremely thin to the point that his body looked abnormally small in relation to his head. Premium commercial dog food gave him back some weight and he was soon looking fairly good.

But he still had health problems. He had an ongoing allergic reaction to something that made his eyes water, his skin was always dry and flaking and he scratched constantly. To make a long story shorter expensive vitamin supplements cured the skin problems and scratching but nothing seemed to help his allergy and if the supplements were stopped his skin problems returned within weeks.

None of it was life threatening and the vets we talked to could offer nothing but pills for the allergic reaction and advising we continue with the supplements. But that was expensive and  inconvenient and we just didn't like the idea of him having to take pills every day for the rest of his life. He was a great dog with a good personality and otherwise seemed perfectly healthy and very robust - in the case of the skin problems at least it just didn't seem reasonable that he needed extra supplements.

At that time the BARF (Bones And Raw Food) diet was just becoming popular in Vancouver. Like many people we were skeptical and didn't really pay much attention to all the claims being made for it. But we had always been interested in wolves and the two basic claims of BARF proponents made a lot of sense - first that dogs shared almost all their evolutionary history with the wolf and that they were designed to do well on the same diet that was natural for wolves and wild canines; second, that commercial dog food had little or no resemblance to that diet.

What tipped the balance was seeing other dogs we knew thriving on the BARF diet. So we started trying it out with Duke. The most obvious thing was that he really liked the BARF diet  - a lot better than dry food and even canned food. He seemed to be doing well on it so we decided to give it a longer trial. Three months later he was a noticeably different dog. His coat was sleeker and softer, his skin problems had disappeared and so had his allergic reactions. We started reading more about BARF and found all these benefits were predicted!

We probably wouldn't have believed it if we'd read it first but the evidence was right before our eyes. The books claimed other benefits and we'd also noticed them as well: very noticeably improved breath, fewer problems with fleas (it's rare for us to use anti-flea products now), a significant decrease in the size of his stools along with a consistently firm texture and almost complete lack of odour - cleaning up after him was no longer the chore it had been. His need for water also dropped and except in hot weather one bowl a day is all that is needed rather than 2 or 3 a day.

We were converts!

The problem.

But while there were all these great benefits there were also problems. First being that for a large dog the sheer daily volume of raw food was fairly large - not a real problem except that we had a fridge with a standard freezer compartment and more than a weeks worth of food took up a pretty good portion of it. So we were shopping for dog food more frequently than when we simply bought a large sack of dry dog food that could be stuck in a convenient corner.

Second was that it seemed none of the food we found was complete by itself. Usually it was recommended to add some supplement or other, commonly sea weed (e.g. for iodine) and fish oil (for Omega acids). And none of the foods seemed to come with bones - the other essential part of the BARF diets. So not only did we have to shop more frequently but instead of buying one item we were buying three or four different things.

The third problem was the prices. The raw meat mixtures were often more expensive than the same type of meat at the supermarket and the vegetable mixtures were more expensive than the meat! At one store we found that a container of just vegetable mix - no meat - was more than $10/KG. It was easily going to cost us more than $100/month for the BARF diet.

The solution.

It just seemed far too complicated and much more expensive than it needed to be. So we started investigating, found local suppliers in the valley, made our own veggie and fruit mixes etc. and eventually decided that it should be possible to produce a BARF product that was complete, didn't occupy the whole freezer but also didn't require a trip to the pet store every week, and wasn't too expensive for the average pet owner to be able to afford. 

We began experimenting with different sources of meat, and trying out different fruit and veggie mixes and ways of preparing it, using both Duke and the pets of friends as taste testers. After two years we had mixes that all our taste testers seemed to like and suppliers and processes that kept costs down and so Duke's Delicious Dog Dinners was born!

Duke's meals uses all fresh vegetables and fruits and high quality meats - after all why would you feed your dog something that wasn't good enough for you? The meals include everything your dog needs - including bones to chew - and the prices not only don't break the bank but include free delivery as often as once a week so there is room left in your freezer for your food and you aren't making trips to the pet food store all the time.