who are we

Our mission at Freshpet is doing what is best for pets.

At first glance, it seems simple, like our foods. But when you look closer, you’ll find that making fresh foods isn’t simple at all and neither is our mission.

Almost seven years ago, a conversation started about how we let our dogs sleep in our beds, about how we buy our cats birthday presents, about how animals make our lives better in a dramatic way.  We thought about how we try to give our pets the best, just like our children, to keep them happy, healthy and safe.   When the conversation shifted to what we feed our pets, we realized that our actions didn’t meet our intentions.  We all love our pets, but every day we pour a processed dry bag of corn and dehydrated meat into a bowl. It just didn’t make sense. Dogs are carnivores. Shouldn’t they be eating meat?

Many of us in that conversation had worked for years in the pet food industry trying to make the healthiest foods we could for pets.  Each day at work, we saw the gap between what pet food should be and what it is.  We became frustrated because no matter what we did we could never make the best food in that environment. It was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Pet food was originally created as an offshoot of the livestock feed industry. It was not created with the longer term health and happiness of the pet in mind. Pet food was created to help factories running efficiently, to keep them busy and  to use up ingredients unusable for human food.  An afterthought.

Our pets are not an afterthought. They are our sidekicks, our sounding boards, our truest friends.  At first, we felt guilty, then frustrated. Finally, we realized we could do something about it. In that small group we had hundreds of years of pet food experience, but  we  also had friends and colleagues who were animal nutritionists, food scientists, veterinarians, experts in sourcing fresh foods and human food quality control. We decided to stop criticizing others and find a way to fix what we thought was wrong.

We started talking about what the ideal food for pets would be; for the first time without the constraints of a big company, only what is best for the animal. We challenged conventional wisdom and learned how different making fresh, natural foods was. What we were talking about doing was not going to be easy. We would need help from all our friends and colleagues.  It turned out these people felt the same way we did about our pets and were excited to do something not just different, but revolutionary.  Something that would change the way the people think about pet food and how they feed their pets.

Over the next year, we researched, planned and began changing what we knew as pet food.  It was not easy, like any small passionate group trying to change the status quo, there were sleepless nights, setbacks, and triumphs. By October of 2006, what was once an idea was now reality? We were making fresh pet food, our way, in our plant.

Each day we are challenged, by the big pet food companies who don’t want to see us succeed, by the difficulties of running a business today, but mostly by ourselves because we know that if we don’t hold ourselves to our mission, no one else will.