We Don't Make Our Own Pet Food — Here's Why

(This article expands on a short video we shared previously) 

We're always showing and talking about so much of what goes on behind the scenes that many are surprised to learn that we don’t own the facility that makes Viva.

“Working with a co-manufacturer means you’re taking someone else’s recipe and just putting your branding on it.” 

“You don’t have any control over the processes and quality if you don’t run your own facility.”

“You use a third-party facility and they’re making a bunch of other products & brands”

The common perception is that working with a co-manufacturer means you have a generic, white-labeled product, while running your own facility is the gold standard. The reality is far more nuanced.

When we first started Viva, we rented time in a commercial kitchen and made every batch of food ourselves. We bought some second-hand equipment and did our best to set up efficient processes, clean well, and follow good manufacturing practices. It wasn't much, but hey, we were making our own food.

As we grew, we faced the choice to either build and set up our own manufacturing facility or look for a partner. The reality was that there was only one option if we wanted to produce our food under the highest standards possible.

Here’s the thing: good equipment is costly, but it plays a very big role in your product quality. Good equipment not only helps you be more efficient (so you can keep costs low), but it reduces the amount of human handling, which prevents cross-contamination, and is specially designed to be easy to disassemble and clean. 

Cost Estimates for Commercial Equipment

Packaging Machine: ~$150,000,  Grinder: ~$200,000, Portioning Machine: ~$200,000  

And it’s not just the equipment, buildings also need to be specially designed for food production. For example, you want to build the facility so that the flow of traffic doesn’t have to go back & forth between raw materials and packaging areas (again, cross-contamination risk), you want separate storage areas for raw ingredients and finished product, and everything (walls, ceilings, drains) needs to be washable. 

The final aspect when it comes to cost is that running your own facility comes with a massive amount of fixed overhead. Most small-medium businesses don’t have the volumes to sustain that. A well-designed and equipped facility can easily cost upwards of $100+ million.

More important than any building or piece of equipment is having people with the know-how of running a safe and efficient facility. A facility lives and dies by its processes. All the best equipment and building design won’t matter if employees don’t know that they shouldn’t handle raw materials (“clean”) if they just went to the dumpster to throw out trash (“dirty”). Here are just a few of the practices we have in place at our facility ( video 1, video 2 ).

It would’ve taken years and millions of dollars (that we would’ve either had to raise or borrow) to set up a facility and train a crew to the standards we wanted. The only realistic option for us, and many other small/medium sized pet food companies, is to find a co-manufacturer.

Making the food in your own facility doesn't automatically make it better since the proper people, processes, and equipment make a far bigger difference in quality. So who is making food in their own facilities? It’s the very large and the very small. The large brands almost always have investor funding to build state-of-the-art facilities. On the other end of the spectrum, you have small producers like local farms, butcher shops, or meat processors that often aren’t aware of what their standards should be. For those who want to produce a high-quality product while keeping costs sustainable, a co-manufacturer ends up being the best option.

The video above compares how certain steps in production looked when we manufactured the food in our own facility vs. when we started working with a co-manufacturer.

The hardest part is that we weren’t just looking for a facility, we were looking for a partner. We needed someone who was willing to be flexible and tailor their processes to achieve our quality goals and this ranged from the big (setting things up to produce a chunky texture which no other raw pet food company offers) to the small (we have a particular way we grind and process our food so it looks fresh and not mushy).

We talked to dozens of facilities for over a year before finally finding a partner we felt confident about. To better explain what the working relationship looks like - let’s look at some of the comments from earlier: 

Our recipe and sourcing is entirely ours. While some co-manufacturers require that you use ingredients they source or their recipes so they can streamline their processes, we insisted on bringing our own supplier relationships and formulations. 

The facility didn’t make any raw pet food before we started working with them and we helped adapt their entire food safety plan for our products. For example, we worked with the facility to set up an  X-ray machine specifically for our production and we’ve brought in many consultants to audit and update their procedures. We essentially taught them how to make raw pet food.

We’re regularly in the plant running experiments, reviewing procedures, and the close relationship is a big reason why we’re able to show you guys so much of what goes on in our facility. Most co-manufacturers are flexible to some degree, but the extent to which we’ve worked together to reshape the facility’s operations is very unique within our industry. 

We’re the only raw pet food product in the facility. However, the real concern behind this comment isn’t that the facility works for other brands but rather that they make dozens of other products and, as a result, don’t care enough about producing Viva.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The facility we work with only made their own branded products before we approached them, and they were not in the business of co-manufacturing. We’re the only other brand they manufacture for, and this means that our products are just as important to them as their own.

While co-manufacturing can result in all of the issues above, it comes down to how you screen and find the right partner. 

We can say with complete confidence that our product quality is much higher today working with a comanufacturer compared to when we ran our own operations because we have access to much better equipment and food safety processes.

Most small-medium pet food businesses are in similar situations and don’t have the money or expertise to set up their own facility. For these reasons, co-manufacturing is incredibly common, and many other raw pet food brands are also produced in third-party facilities.

We would one day love to have our own facility, but for now, we’re working with the best partner and ensuring we’re making our recipes under the highest standards.