Business View Magazine | August 2020

64 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2020 and we were getting her fed on a special veterinarian diet. I started doing a little bit more research on the raw diet; I hadn’t realized that it was a lot more nutritious and would probably resolve some of the health issues she was having. So we put her on the diet and there was an immediate benefit. The allergies resolved and she was significantly healthier.” “That prompted us to put all our dogs on a raw food diet,” Geraldine continues, “and when we would have a litter of puppies and send them home with their new families, they would ask us what we were feeding our dogs. So, we would explain to them that we were giving a raw food diet to them and we’d give the instructions to them, as well, and send them home with some food. They would call us back in a couple of week’s time and say, ‘We’re out of food; we’re trying to make it ourselves,’ or ‘We’re trying to find someone to make it for us, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of options in the market. Would you make us some more, or could you tell us where to buy some?’ So that started where we were making food for a few of our customers’ families that lived close to us. They’d come out on the weekends and grab a couple of hundred pounds of food for their dog, and we’d charge them a bit of money.” As the Brouwers family grew (they have 5 children), they decided to see if making and selling their raw pet food on a larger scale was an option to allow them more time to spend time with their growing family. It started with an email to their puppy families and connections with breeders in Ontario. “We said anybody who’s interested, or anybody who knows anybody that’s looking for raw dog food, we can make it,” Geraldine recalls. “And within a couple of days, we had 20 people who were interested – a lot more than I thought there would be – so that’s how we started selling direct to the consumer.” In time, the couple was contacted by a specialty